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JAPAN OR GERMANY 

FREDERIC COLEMAN 



JAPAN OR 
GERMANY 

The Inside Story of the Struggle 
in Siberia 



BY 

FREDERIC COLEMAN, F.R.G.S. 

AUTHOR OF 
"OUR BOYS OVER THERE," "FROM MONS TO YPRES WITH 
GENERAL FRENCH. " "OPEN EYES IN THE ORIENT." ETC. 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



' c 



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^^(^ 



COPYRIGHT. 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



MAY cO 1918 



PRINTED IN THE TOUTED STATES OF AMERICA 



©C:.A499324 ^ 



TO 

LOIS 



PREFACE 

Should Japan go to Siberia? Before a sin- 
gle soldier of the Land of the Rising Sun 
crosses the frontier of the Russian Far East, 
and for many years after the Great War has 
ended, the pros and cons of that question will 
be debated. 

What will the sending of the Japanese army 
to the Northland mean toward the development 
of the Far Eastern question and the struggle 
for the Mastery of the Pacific? 

How will Japan emerge from the World War I 

What effect will the participation of Japan 
in the solution of the Russian problem have on 
the Slav in Siberia and his ultimate destinies? 

Some of these queries must needs be left to 
Time himself for answer. A study of condi- 
tions in the Russian Far East and in Japan, ex- 
tending over the period immediately prefacing 
the date of the proposal that Japan should send 
troops to Russian territory, may assist to a bet- 
ter understanding of the situation, at least so 
far as it can develop until the march of events 
has carried it beyond its initial stages. 

vii 



viii Preface 

I have been in Japan several times at critical 
epochs in her history. I saw Japan and Siberia 
in 1916 and again in 1917. In writing this little 
book I have no other object in view than to 
place before those who are interested something 
of what I saw in the Orient and the Far North- 
east. I am less of a prophet than a witness. 

Should Japan go to Siberia? 

By all means Yes, emphatically Yes, if she 
goes in the right spirit, and if when she goes a 
campaign of education and explanation goes 
with her. If Japan is merely to go to guard a 
pile of stores from the Huns, or even to pre- 
vent Bolsheviki disruption along the path of 
the Trans-Siberian, and the echo of the tramp 
of her legions bears no other significance than 
these, then No, a thousand times No. 

If Japan goes with her eyes on the farther 
West, and with her goes a group of educators ; 
sympathetic, understanding, earnest men with 
hearts in their breasts and hands of fellowship 
outstretched to the Eussian in Siberia, who 
knows what may not come from such co-opera- 
tion? 

May the day not dawn when the Eussian who 
cares — and there are tens of thousands of him 
in Eussia and always will be — ^will look upon 
that army of the Island Empire of the East as 



Preface 



IX 



his own rallying-point, his own line of first de- 
fence? Head-work and heart-work might do 
wonders toward the bringing of that day. 

We are in this war to a finish. We mean to 
stay in it mitil we down the Boche and all he 
stands for. Shall we forever blunder on in 
Russia with the English-speaking propensity 
for error! Shall the German be the only one 
who acts with wisdom — Machiavellian wisdom 
sometimes, but none the less far-seeing — as to 
the attributes of strange peoples? The Ger- 
man has made more mistakes as an interna- 
tional student of racial psychology than we. 
True. But in the instances where he has shown 
wisdom let us learn from him. Let us teach the 
Russian. He is eager to learn, really, and his 
only school is either dominated by or whole- 
somely tinctured with German propaganda. We 
do not need to stoop to methods of lying fraud 
to compete with the Boche in Russia. The 
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth 
is the finest basis in the world for international 
educational work. 

Let Japan go to Siberia — and let something 
else go with her. 

Let us not only save the stores in Vladivostok, 
the Trans-Siberian Railway Line, and the pro- 
ducts and territory of that vast region from the 



X Preface 

Hun. Let us save the people of Siberia as well. 
Perhaps through that work we may gain ground 
further to the Westward, who knows? 

Any work, however arduous, that bears even 
a remote promise of helping the Russian people 
to come into their own a little sooner, to check 
the disintegration of the vast land a moment 
earlier, to bring the dim light of the dawn of a 
newer, better day for Russia nearer, surer, is 
worth our every effort. 

Let Japan go to Siberia. The ground is fal- 
low. The seed of the righteousness of our cause 
will find sure root there. Let Japan go — and 
with her send the sowers. 

Fbederic Coleman. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The New Japan 15 

II Japan and the War , 27 

III More About Japan 43 

IV Concerning Siberia 65 

V The Revolution Comes to the Russian 

Far East 85 

VI New Hands at the Helm of Govern- 
ment 105 

VII On Discipline 123 

VIII Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok . . 135 

IX The Trans-Siberian Transportation 

Problem 161 

X The Fanatic Element 183 

XI German Propaganda 203 

XII Back to Japan — and Home to the 

U.S. A 219 



THE NEW JAPAN 



JAPAN OR GERMANY 



CHAPTER I 

The New Japan 

Ninety-nine per cent of the Englislimen and 
Americans in the Orient have strong suspicions 
that when Japan moves her troops to any par- 
ticular locality in the Far East, Japanese sol- 
diers, Japanese influence and, very probably, 
Japanese jurisdiction will be cemented to that 
locality so tightly that a temporary expedient 
will drift in time into a permanent occupation. 

A study of conditions in the Orient in 1916 
and 1917 shows ample reason for an abandon- 
ment of such theories or at least a very whole- 
sale alteration of them. 

The fact that the wars which Japan has 
waged with foreign powers have been for her 
national security rather than for territorial 
aggrandisement, or at least that national se- 
curity has been the leading factor in Japan's 

15 



i6 Japan or Germany 

war policy, is a conclusion which clever students 
of Oriental affairs are becoming daily more 
willing to accept. 

Japan's continual encroachments on the sov- 
ereignty of China, particularly in Manchuria, 
have very naturally obscured the real issue at 
times. A man who has seen and studied Ja- 
pan's efforts to get a commercial foothold in 
Eastern Inner Mongolia cannot be blamed if he 
fails to see wherein the security of the Japanese 
Empire has necessitated some of the measures 
which Japan has allowed her officials and her 
nationals to adopt. 

Nevertheless the underlying motive of Ja- 
pan's policy to-day is fear. Japan is afraid of 
isolation. A certain number of Japanese jin- 
goes write and talk continuously about Japan's 
greatness and her ability to press military domi- 
nation. In no country in the world is there a 
greater difference between the loud-mouthed 
jingo of the nation and the sober, responsible 
statesman. On frequent occasions a series of 
articles in some paper of the comparative stand- 
ing of the Tokio Yamato talk brazenly about 
the abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese treaty, 
or the forcing by Japan of America and Aus- 
tralia to change their laws in accordance with 
Japanese wishes. One of Japan's publicists 



The New Japan 17 

frequently contributes an article to some maga- 
zine or review in Japan which, if taken serious- 
ly, would lead the reader to believe that not 
only was Japan's security thoroughly estab- 
lished, but that she was in a position to dictate 
to the other great powers as to whatever policy 
she decided to follow in the Far East. 

People who read these things and from them 
judge Japan make a woful mistake. The most 
long-headed among the Japanese have long 
seen that Japan 's position among the nations of 
the world required friendly co-operation and 
sympathy with some powers and actual alliance 
with others. 

Russia's encroachments in the Far East prior 
to the Russo-Japanese war were actually a seri- 
ous menace to Japan's security. Imperial Rus- 
sia was a potential menace to Japan subse- 
quent to the war which ended in 1905. 

When, in the early part of this century, Count 
Hayashi in London brought off the Anglo-Jap- 
anese Alliance and made it the basis of Japan's 
foreign policy, he procured for Japan some- 
thing that was so patent a necessity for the Is- 
land Empire of the East that it has been held 
by many students of Oriental affairs to have 
been, until the present war, a one-sided affair, 
very much to Japan's benefit. 



l8 Japan or Germany 

While Japan has so arranged her railways 
that they ring 'round her rocky island coasts 
and are planned with every eye to their strategic 
value in time of possible warfare, the vital de- 
fence of Japan rests in her ability to keep open 
the sea routes which allow her to keep touch 
mth the outside world. The fact that it is ex- 
tremely unlikely, if ixot impossible, for any 
power to conduct a successful military opera- 
tion on Japanese territory does not alter the 
fact that, should Japan be overwhelmed at sea 
and her islands surrounded by a. hostile cordoil 
of battleships and cruisers, her ultimate defeat 
would be certain. 

In plain English, Japan's security has de- 
manded for many years, and always will de- 
mand, an alliance with a power which is suffi- 
ciently strong at sea so that Japan will be freed 
from the danger of isolation. 

A very brief study of Japan's history is re- 
quired to show how gradually is coming the 
more general adoption in Japan — an adoption 
which is by no means general as yet — or the 
more statesmanlike and common-sense view of 
Japan's position internationally in contradis- 
tinction to the militarist and aggressive policy 
of those Japanese who have an inflated idea of 
Japan's importance and capacity. 



The New Japan 19 

The outcry of the Japanese press in 1915 
against England and the almost universal criti- 
cism by Japan's newspapers of the Anglo- 
Japanese Alliance was promulgated and fos- 
tered by the extreme militarist group. It was 
one of the signs in 1915 of a last, dying effort 
on the part of the old militarist element to as- 
sert itself. Another of its expiring struggles 
to impose its policies on the country was the 
effort to force on to China the infamous Five 
Group Demands. 

In those days Japan's foreign policy was in 
the hands of the Genro, or Elder Statesmen. 
The Premier, Count Okuma, was a mere tool in 
their hands. He and his Cabinet had no voice 
in the foreign policy of Japan. A better ele- 
ment in Japan was coming to the fore. The 
younger group of Japan's statesmen realised 
the weakness of Japan's position. The Genro 
were aged men; their lives were drawing to a 
close. An increasing number of the thinkers of 
Japan saw that when the Genro passed, a sys- 
tem and a policy would pass with them. 

As the eyes of the Japanese began to open to 
that situation, two schools took definite form: 
one was the militarist school, which based its 
ideas and theories upon German thought and 
German teaching. As in Germany, the profes- 



20 Japan or Germany 

sor, scientist and publicist faction supplied 
many advocates to the point of view held by the 
militarists. The opposing school represented a 
more liberal line of thought. It realised Japan *s 
weakness if isolation should be its portion — 
whether that isolation would be military or eco- 
nomic. It saw that Japan's commercial future 
in China was of vital necessity to Japan's suc- 
cessful development. The raw materials of the 
Asiatic continent must be procured by Japan, 
as she has insufficient mines of her own. Ja- 
pan's manufactured products must be marketed 
in China if she would continue the development 
of her industries and commerce. China became 
recognised as a necessity to Japan. Moreover, 
the new school of thought realised that the only 
possible method by which Japan's ideals could 
be attained was by gaining the friendship of 
China rather than its antagonism. 

In October, 1916, when Count Terauchi be- 
came Premier, Japan was standing at the cross- 
roads. Already those who had argued that Ja- 
pan should follow the policy of Germany, were 
meeting more and more opposition. Terauchi, 
supposed to be militarist, pure and simple, 
showed that he held many liberal ideas. He 
declared at the outset that the policy of his 
Government would be to cooperate unequivo- 



The New Japan 21 

cally with the Allies. He more than once dis- 
played evidences that he conscientiously desired 
to live up to his obligations, so far as the war 
was concerned, and that so long as he was at 
the helm in Japan she could be depended upon 
to do so, at least to the extent of his power to 
guide his country and his countrymen. 

Then came with 1917 the entrance of the 
United States into the war. America was no 
longer the great quiescent, dormant power on 
the other side of the Pacific, but was taking 
rapid steps toward becoming one of the strong- 
est naval and military powers in the world. 
That change in Japan's great neighbour to the 
eastward put the final nails in the coffin of the 
policies of aggression advocated by Japan's 
extreme militarists. The only argument which 
they can bring to bear to-day against the liberal 
policies of New Japan is a croaking prophecy 
that Germany may be able to emerge victorious 
from the war. If Germany won, the element in 
Japan which has advocated that their country 
should follow in the footsteps of Germany would 
be undeniably strengthened. But even Japan, 
so far away from the conflict in Europe and so 
little informed as to the actual progress of 
events, is beginning to realise that Germany 
cannot win the war. 



22 Japan or Germany 

Japan is taking advantage, commercially 
and industrially, of the situation created in the 
Orient by the World War. She is leaving no 
stone unturned to gain a foothold wherever op- 
portunity presents and is developing situations 
which she knows well may not exist for many 
years. This is particularly true of China. So 
long as Japan conducts her negotiations in the 
open, however, her crying need for Chinese raw 
material and her equal need of China as a mar- 
ket for her manufactured products give no little 
excuse to her efforts in that direction. She is 
again spurred by fear. 

If she failed to take advantage of the ab- 
sence of many of her competitors, she could 
never hope to successfully compete with them 
in certain lines and in certain localities. The 
desire on the part of Japan to push her com- 
mercial propaganda during the war almost as- 
sumes the character of a fevered rush for some 
newly discovered goldfield. She wants all the 
advantage she can get. She knows she is going 
to need it when the war is over and the great 
commercial and industrial nations turn their 
eyes to the Far East. She knows that she will 
need every advantage she has gained, and more, 
in the business war that is coming one day in 
the Orient. The advanced Japanese is under 



The New Japan 23 

little hallucination as to the capability of most 
Japanese industrial concerns to hold their own 
on equal terms with the big manufacturers of 
America, England and Germany. 

Just as her need for national security de- 
mands friendship and alliance with a group of 
great powers, so her ultimate industrial and 
economic welfare depends to a considerable ex- 
tent on friendly relations with some of her most 
strenuous competitors. 



JAPAN AND THE WAR 



CHAPTER 11 
Japan and the War 

When I go to Japan I talk to many Japanese 
from many walks of life. 

A sojourn in Japan before I went to Siberia 
and a stay of some weeks in Tokyo on my re- 
turn journey filled my ears with arguments 
from the Japanese standpoint on the question 
of whether or not Japan should send her troops 
to Harbin, to Vladivostok, along the Trans- 
Siberian Railway as far west as Irkutsk, or 
even farther to the westward. 

As all the world has discussed what England, 
France, and America think of such action by 
eJapan, and the effect on the mind and temper 
of the Russian that would be the immediate re- 
sult of a Japanese army on Siberian soil, the 
opinions and ideas of the Japanese themselves 
should not be left out of consideration. 

I went to Siberia with the full knowledge that 
the Russians in the Pri-Amur country held very 
decided views about Japan. The Japanese were 
unpopular in the Russian Far East, 

27 



28 Japan or Germany 

I discovered the extent of the feeling, iti 
causes and how it has been fostered. 

When I returned to Japan I was an advocate 
of Japanese troops, under certain circum- 
stances, being sent to Harbin. 

I lost no opportunity to get the right per- 
spective in Tokyo. I left Yokohama for Van- 
couver with the confirmed belief that before the 
smart little soldiers of Japan's army were land- 
ed in Vladivostok or placed in the towns along 
the Trans-Siberian Eailway the situation must 
be so serious that such action was recognised 
as inevitable. Conditions in Eussia must needs 
first be well-nigh hopeless. 

Of that, however, more anon. First, what 
did my friends in Japan think of all these 
things! 

To begin with, my friends in Japan, with rare 
exceptions, were somewhat less interested in 
the war than you might think. 

Japan went into the war without any rush 
of fine, high enthusiasm. The man in the street 
in Japan knew little about the w^hole business. 
The Government did it all. All Japan knew 
that the country had gone into the war out of 
loyalty to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. But 
Japan was a long way from the fighting in Eu- 
rope, and the fighting in the Orient, — the fight 



Japan and the War 29 

ing with which, the Japanese had to do, — was 
of little consequence, after all, and was soon 
over. 

Japanese editors, of whom I know many, al- 
ways reminded me of the restricted extent to 
which Japan had pledged her help. **Our war 
zone, it must be remembered,'* they would say, 
^*is bounded on the west by the Indian Ocean. 
Read the terms of the Alliance and you will see 
that. Further to the west the British Govern- 
ment does not want us to go. We have always 
been told that our part in this war is to guard 
the Orient. We have done that. The sending 
of some of our fleet to the Mediterranean was an 
exception, and naturally was discussed as such 
by Japan. On all sides was criticism of the 
Government for taking such a step — every one 
wanted to know what reward Japan would get." 

Sooner or later it comes to that in Japan, 
I'm afraid. 

*^What will we get out of it?" That ques- 
tion is at the back of all the arguments about 
the war. And naturally so, perhaps, in Japan. 

This is a war, we say, for democracy. Japan 
is not a democracy. Count Terauchi, the able 
Premier of Japan, said not long ago that democ- 
racy is one of the greatest dangers of the age. 
Terauchi, whom I admire sincerely and who has 



\ 



30 Japan or Germany 

proved himself to be a strong man indeed dur- 
ing the past year and a half, is no democrat. 
He might be an even stronger man if he was a 
democrat, but he could not, then, be Premier of 
Japan. 

Thus, if Japan is not a democracy and wants 
none of democracy, so far as its own Govern- 
ment is concerned, why should the Japanese not 
look carefully into the possible gain that may 
come to them before they take a further step 
toward war — real war, fighting and bloodshed 
and casualty and loss ? I 

**We took Kiao-chow from the Germans, and 
our fleet not only convoyed the Australian 
troop-ships, but kept the Pacific clean of Ger- 
man raiders. Germany's islands in the South- 
em Seas, too, we occupied,'' said Mr. Tsushima 
to me one day. Mr. Tsushima is the editor of 
the Tokyo Nichi Nichi, which I have heard 
called the Daili/ Mail of Japan. 

**You see, Japan has been doing everything 
in her power, seen and unseen, to assist the 
Allies," he continued. *^Yet the Japanese are 
called selfish by many of you, because Japan 
has made a great economic advancement." 

I confess I had called the Japanese selfish. 
They may have no monopoly of that virtue, but 
they are selfish. I had told Mr. Tsushima, fur- 



Japan and the War 31 

ther, that I thought Japan too indifferent to 
the war — that Japan did not pay the sort of 
serious attention to the war she should do. 

"What would you have Japan do!" queried 
Mr. Tsushima. **Are the Western Allies in a 
round-about way urging Japan to mobilise her 
soldiers and send them to Europe?'' 

I admitted I could not say that. Pichon in 
France had long wanted the army of Japan on 
the Western Front, but few supporters of such 
a policy stood with him. 

**Only a small section of Japanese favoured 
M. Pichon 's proposal," continued Mr. Tsu- 
shima. **No general interest was aroused in 
Japan by it, but it always crops up when there 
is a reverse for the Entente in the war situa- 
tion. I think no Japanese statesmen of com- 
mon sense have considered the matter seriously. 
If the Entente armies reach a point where they 
really require reenforcement by the Japanese 
army, Japan may not shirk her duty, but be- 
fore the Allies request Japan's mobilisation let 
them review the reasons why Japan joined in 
the war, and what material assistance she has 
rendered. Then let them make up their minds 
as to what Japan will gain. ' ' 

He had reached the moot point at last. Most 



32 Japan or Germany 

of them come to it, in Japan, if you give tliem 
time. 

One of the most astute of Japan's political 
leaders became very frank with me after din- 
ner one evening. We were discussing the steel 
embargo. America was stopping the shipment 
of steel to Japan and Japan was very much 
upset in consequence. 

I held that Japan was not pulling her fair 
share of the war-load. She could well release 
much of her shipping to assist the Atlantic 
freight fleets. She could, without entailing ac- 
tual hardship in Japan, send ships where bot- 
toms were badly needed by the Allies, — where 
the shortage of ships was the most vital point 
of weakness in the Allies' armour. 

My Japanese friend commenced his argument 
in reply with the keynote — What would Japan 
gain? He asked me to put myself in the place 
of the average Japanese — the man of average 
intelligence. This is how he thought I would 
then view the proposal that Japan should make 
further sacrifice in the war: The Japanese 
are not a popular race. If they are to believe 
what they hear and what they read, Canadians, 
Americans of the Pacific Coast, Australians, 
and the English and Americans in the Far East 
: — in short, those of the English-speaking races 



Japan and the War 33 

with whom they are m a sense neighbours and 
with whom they sometimes come in touch, are 
not imbued with love for the Japanese. Quite 
the contrary. Russians do not love the Japa- 
nese. 

When the war ends, all agree that a great 
commercial struggle will commence in the 
Orient. A combination of interests may or 
may not be made between nations, but who will 
look after the interests of Japan! Who beside 
herself? Will friendly hands be stretched out 
to her to assist her industrially and commer- 
cially? Never. If combinations are made, they 
will not include Japan. She will have to fight 
alone. She is less powerful financially than her 
big competitors, too. She has less wealth, less 
industrial capacity as yet, less commercial abil- 
ity. She is a baby in business with few years 
of experience of organised business effort or 
combined commercial action behind her. 

What is her wisest course ? To keep her ships 
and foster her growing industries ? To increase 
as best she may and while she may her grow- 
ing hold on the commerce of China, taking ad- 
vantage of the absence of her competitors from 
many a field in which she has none too much 
time to gain great advantage before they re- 
turn to fight her with better weapons and un- 



34 Japan or Germany 

deniable inlierent advantages of more than one 
kind? Or should Japan give freely her help 
to the Allies, reduce her shipping fleets, ham- 
per her export trade, cut down the raw material 
that is coming in to feed her mills and factories! 
For what? To beat Germany! Then what? 
What of the aftermath? Will her sacrifice be 
rewarded? How? 

Do you catch the drift? Do you see the point 
of view from the Japanese side? I did. I not 
only saw it then, but I kept rubbing shoulders 
with it all the time I was in Japan. The Oriental 
is not usually so outspoken as my friend the 
political leader. He camouflages. But he is no 
more inscrutable than are many Western men. 
When he has an idea in the back of his head, 
a fundamental idea that sticks there and on 
which his theories are based and his house of 
argument and reasoning is built, it can be 
found, usually, if one gets under the surface. 

The same thing applied with relation to talk 
about sending Japanese soldiers away from 
Japan to fight for the Allied Cause. Japan has 
had a habit of getting some quid pro quo when 
she fights. Her war with China in 1894 found 
her too young and weak to insist on the benefits 
she craved. In 1900 she lost nothing in the 
Peace Negotiations that followed the Boxer 



Japan and the War 35 

Trouble in China. In 1904, when she defeated 
Eussia, her ambitions were clipped somewhat 
by watchful Powers. Still, Japan has been 
gaining, gaining gradually. Formosa, Korea, 
the railway zone in Manchuria, and now Kiao- 
chow (not to mention other parts of China 
where she is gaining gradually, too), have fallen 
under her protecting mantle. 

There is another small prospective gain that 
comes to mind in these days of tortured, dis- 
integrated, groaning Russia. Before the Great 
War, Manchuria, that province of China in 
which China has so little authority, was under 
a sort of dual protection. At the end of the 
Russo-Japanese war the Russians administered 
the Chinese Eastern Railway zone from Harbin 
south to Chang-chun. There Japanese admin- 
istration commenced, and ran down the railway 
to Mukden, then south to Port Arthur and Dai- 
ren, as well as eastward to Antung, on the road 
to Korea. The Japanese had worked hard to 
make the district along the railway productive. 
From Mukden north to Chang-chun the soya 
bean was being grown in increasing quantities. 
On to the north, from Chang-chun to Harbin, 
lay the most fertile lands of all. Not only along 
the railway but beside the River Sungari was 
untouched, virgin soil that Russian supervision 



36 Japan or Germany 

bade fair to leave untouched for all time. So 
Japan began negotiations with Russia to ex- 
tend her sphere of influence to Harbin, and 
take over the administration of the railway 
zone from Harbin south. The rights of navi- 
gation on the upper reaches of the Sungari, 
hitherto exclusively Eussian, were also to go to 
Japan. 

I was in Tokyo in 1916 when Viscount Mo- 
tono, now Minister of Foreign Affairs in the 
Terauchi Government, came back from his posi- 
tion as Ambassador to Petrograd to take his 
new folio. Before he left Russia he had tried 
a diplomatic fall with his friends there. He 
had won out. The bit of railway south of Har- 
bin was to go to Japan. It was settled. Just 
when the change was to be made I could not dis- 
cover. After the war, surely, but possibly be- 
fore. I imagined that the chaotic state of af- 
fairs in Russia toward the end of 1917 would 
shelve all such deals indefinitely, but not long 
ago in Peking, Baron Hayashi, Japan's able 
Minister to China, told me he hoped the final 
steps would shortly be taken whereby the trans- 
fer would be consummated. 

Russian maladministration in Manchuria 
will bear one sure result. Wherever Japan may 
send her soldiers before the war is done, what- 



Japan and the War 37 

ever reward she may expect or gain for the part 
she plays, her coveted line to Harbin will be hers 
inevitably and irrevocably. That will put her 
soldiers in Harbin, as railway guards, in such 
numbers as she deems necessary. 

En passant, it won't be such a bad thing for 
the Manchurian farmer, after all. He will bene- 
fit all along that strip of railway from Harbin 
to Chang-chun, just as his brother agricultural- 
ist has benefited further south. The Japanese 
farmer cannot compete with him. He is one of 
the best intensive farmers going, is the Man- 
churian. He can do more work and live more 
cheaply than any Japanese immigrant who may 
be induced to brave the rigours of the Man- 
churian climate. Few Japanese will come, and 
those who come will either drift back to the 
towns or go away. The Manchurian farmer is 
safe. It's disappointing in some ways, to some 
Japanese, but it can't be helped. The overflow 
population of Japan, if it finds it has to move 
out to make room for more overflow population 
some day, will not come to Manchuria — not in 
sufficient numbers to cut much figure. 

Wliile on the subject of the way Japan looks 
upon rewards for effort, I frequently discussed 
the question of the future of Tsing-tau. 

The rights Germany enjoyed in Shan-tung 



38 Japan or Germany 

and her towns of Tsing-tau and Kiao-cliow were 
appropriated by the Japanese when they de- 
feated the Boche in China in 1914. Japan made 
a sort of an agreement to evacuate Tsing-tau 
and go home one day, but the document is open 
to many an interpretation and the man who 
hopes to live until Shan-tung is free of Japa- 
nese control is planning a longevity which would 
be as extraordinary as the evacuation itself. 

Not long ago I probed into this subject with 
a Japanese gentleman of sufficiently high offi- 
cial standing so that I was placed under a prom- 
ise not to give his name. He said that the dec- 
laration of war by China against Germany and 
the cancellation of all the treaties and agree- 
ments with Germany left China and Japan free 
to discuss the disposition of the rights Ger- 
many had enjoyed in Shan-tung until Japan 
took them over. 

After Japan had taken possession of Tsing- 
tau and ousted the Germans, she made a treaty 
with China in which she agreed to take the ques- 
tion up with Germany at the Peace Conference 
which would follow the Great War, and subse- 
quently tell China all about it. That is not the 
phraseology used, but a study of the documents 
brings one to that sort of feeling. China's dec- 
laration of war against Germany, then, accord- 



Japan and the War 39 

ing to my official Japanese friend, rendered that 
Chino-Japanese agreement null and void. 

*^Wliat is going to happen T' I asked. 

^*We will make an altogether new treaty with 
China about Shan-tung, ' ' was the reply. 

''Will Japan leave Shan-tung?" 

*'I think not," he said frankly. 

We smiled. 

I knew, and he knew that I knew. So why not 
be frank? 



MORE ABOUT JAPAN 



CHAPTER III 

More About Japan 

In trying to get an idea of what the Japan- 
ese think of sending an army to Siberia, we 
must be fair to the hustling, clever little Ori- 
ental folk. It is easy to get the wrong impres- 
sion of a nation, especially when the medium of 
conversation is so difficult as that between a 
Japanese and an American. Few people real- 
ise how hard it is to express our ideas in Japan- 
ese. If the best scholar in Japan translated an 
English article into Japanese and later the 
next-best scholar translated the same article 
back into English, the differences between the 
result and the original text would be many and 
probably vital. 

The Japanese does not think as the West- 
erner does, of course. He not only has a differ- 
ent way of thinking, but his mental process 
halts frequently when he is considering big, 
outside questions. 

In 1911 Prince Katsura started for Russia 

43 



44 Japan or Germany 

on a world-tour. In Manchuria he was met by 
Hsu-Shi-Chang, one of the most astute of Chi- 
nese politicians. Hsu-Shi-Chang asked the 
Prince what he thought of the political outlook 
in the Orient. 

Prince Katsura is reported to have replied 
laconically and with a shrug of his shoulders, 
^^ Japan is no longer Japan of the Orient; she 
is now concerned with world politics." 

I think that is true — more true to-day than 
ever before, but it does not mean that the people 
of Japan have kept pace with her Government. 
Maybe that is not necessary, but in the end the 
people have to be considered a bit, even in 
Japan. Public opinion does not cut much figure 
in the Orient yet, but one or two instances have 
been seen of new influences at work, and work- 
ing effectually, at that. 

In a country where over seventy per cent of 
the schools are primary schools, and where the 
boys and girls spend several years mastering 
the alphabet, or what stands for it, a mental 
equipment which gives full equality with his 
prototype in America can hardly be asked fairly 
of the Japanese. He is no fool, mind you. But 
his education is, on some counts, weird. It's 
very Japanese. 

Ask a Japanese school-boy who invented the 



More about Japan 45 

telegraph, the telephone, or the gramophone. 
Ask him who discovered electricity. He will 
answer, if he thinks he knows, in ninety-nine 
cases out of a hundred by naming some Japan- 
ese. His idea of foreign countries is vague. 
Japan sees to it that her sons think a lot of 
Japan. There is good in that idea, but there 
may be some bad if it is carried too far. 

In a country which has a constitution of a 
sort, the preamble of which says it is to be ruled 
by a line of Emperors unbroken, eternal, 
descended from Heaven, and that no power on 
earth is to change one minute phrase or clause 
of that constitution except the Emperor him- 
self — a constitution that makes the Ministers 
of the Crown responsible solely to the Emperor, 
who appoints them and dismisses them at will 
— its world politics depend little on the ideas 
and opinions of the man in the street. 

The voter in Japan is not much in evidence. 
Less than ^ve per cent of the population have 
the franchise, though any man who pays taxes 
in a sum which is the equivalent of five dollars 
or thereabouts per year has a vote. A poor 
country? Yes. And at the same time the 
most heavily taxed people in proportion to their 
earned incomes of any people in the world. So 
it is natural enough that the Japanese should 



46 Japan or Germany 

have a view of outside lands that is not always 
in the right perspective. 

The people of Japan will learn. They have 
learned much in a short cycle. They are always 
learning. But democracy and anti-materialism 
do not mean much to them yet. 

One of the editors of the Asahi called on 
me in Tokyo not long ago and we indulged in 
a lengthy chat about the fight for Constitution- 
alism in Japan. I had not many days before, 
in Karazawa, seen Mr. Ozaki, Ex-Minister of 
Justice in the Okuma Cabinet, who, with Vis- 
count Kato, leader of what terms itself the Con- 
stitutionalist Party in Japan, heads the fight 
for Constitutionalism. 

*^ Ozaki is no further along the road than 
when I saw him in 1916," I remarked. **What 
are you doing, you Constitutionalists? What 
chance have you to make headway? Are you 
getting anywhere? Do you see any hope for 
your projects?'' 

He talked long and earnestly. Boiled down, 
his remarks held nothing but this: One day, 
some day, they hoped to make the Emperor see 
that certain changes in the Constitution were of 
vital interest to Japan and for Japan's welfare. 
Then they might enlist the Emperor's sympathy 
in their cause, and gain his support for their 



More about Japan 47 

proposals. A campaign of education — the pro- 
letariat educating the Crowni. Interesting. 

Mr. Tukotomy of the Tokyo Kokumin Shim- 
him is a live man. He is a wise man, on some 
counts, though his contemporaries will not 
agree to that. His was the only paper in Japan 
of any weight or standing that was behind 
Count Terauchi when he was made Premier in 
October, 1916. A conversation with Mr. Tuko- 
tomy is always bright. He represents a certain 
line of thought in Japan that has some influ- 
ence. Tukotomy 's idea in the latter part of 
1917 was that Japan and America should help 
Russia only on condition that the great, strug- 
gling Slav nation put its house in order. If 
Eussia adopted a Constitution and proceeded 
under some stable form of government, Japan 
and America should join hands and give what 
succour they could; but for either country to 
try to assist Russia until the internal complica- 
tions were in better shape, would be, he thought, 
interfering with Russia's domestic affairs. 
Tokotomy has travelled extensively on the 
Asiatic Continent, and knows well the anti- 
Japanese feeling in certain breasts in Siberia. 
He knows equally well what a hornet's nest 
would be raised in the Russian Far East if 



48 Japan or Germany 

Japanese interference with Kussian affairs had 
the appearance of being forced. 

To send troops to Siberia, unless there was 
no other way out, seemed to Tokotomy, to judge 
from his editorials and remarks, to risk no in- 
considerable asset in a growing feeling of 
friendship for Japan among the Eussians. 

The most influential paper in the commercial 
world in Tokyo is the Chugwai Shogyo, Its 
editor is Mr. Yanada. I had more than one talk 
with him, and found him most keen to help 
Russia, but anxious that no mistaken policy 
would undermine the commercial structure 
Japan had already begun to build in the way of 
increased trade with Siberia. 

Suggestions along that line started me off 
among Japan's shipping magnates, several of 
whom I had met. Every one of them to whom 
I talked referred to the great danger of in- 
curring Russian enmity. 

*^It is the Chinese question all over again, *' 
said one. *^Our politicians make some move 
that seems to them to be a gain to us and we 
lose the sympathy and friendship of the Chi- 
nese. Boycotts of Japanese goods follow. The 
Chinese refuse or hesitate to buy anything that 
comes from Japan. Hatred of us and rancour 
against us are fomented on all sides, and it 



More about Japan 49 

takes years of quiet spade-work to get back the 
ground we have lost. 

*^The best thing about the present Govern- 
ment is that it is trying hard to make good 
friends of the Chinese. If you want to sell 
goods to a man you are careful not to antago- 
nise him. It's the same way in Russia, or in Si- 
beria. If we send troops there it may cause 
us a set-back for years in building up a market 
there. It's a very good potential market, too, 
is Russia, and we are sure to reap much good 
from it. I hope nothing happens to make the 
Russians feel bitter against us. There is too 
much of that now. ' ' 

The war? Oh, yes, there IS a war. But my 
friend the Japanese shipping magnate was not 
thinking so much of the war just then as of 
** Business as Usual,'' and more particularly, 
business rather more than usual after the war. 
But he is no exception as Japanese business 
men go. They never take the war into consid- 
eration when they start movements, or try to 
do so. 

I was in Osaka in 1916 when the outcry was 
raised in the cotton industrial world of Japan 
at the British Embargo against the entry of 
Japanese cotton goods into Great Britain dur- 
ing the war. I heard the same sort of outcry 



50 Japan or Germany 

in 1917 in Japan at the time of the American 
Steel Embargo. There was less outcry when 
the Japanese Government tried to get ships 
for the Allies, but though less noise was heard 
more pressure was brought to bear. Terauchi 
was powerless against the big shipping inter- 
ests. How far he really wanted to go no man 
may know, but certain it is that he would have 
liked to have come much nearer meeting the 
requests of the Allies than he could do. 

Big business is supposed to be very material. 
Big business in Japan lives up to its bad name 
in that regard. It is all material, every bit. 

Dr. Soyeda of the Hochi, one of the most 
widely-read and influential daily newspapers in 
Tokyo, was very much against all suggestions 
that an armed Japanese force should be sent 
to Europe, when that proposal was made, for 
the very reason that he thought it quite pos- 
sible that the day might come when Japan's 
army would have to check Germany's encroach- 
ment on the Orient by way of Siberia. He held 
that view strongly and for months elaborated 
it — although he, too, was chary of hurting the 
feelings of the Russians. He thought Japan 
should play her part, however, and give all as- 
sistance demanded of her, even to the despatch 
of troops to Siberia. 



More about Japan 51 

While I was in Japan an article that attracted 
some general attention was published over the 
signature of Dr. Takahashi Sakuye, who was 
formerly a director of the Legislative Bureau. 
A well-known reviewer in Japan described Dr. 
Takahashi as a representative Japanese, a 
scholar of wide knowledge, who had held one 
of the most important positions in the whole 
Japanese official hierarchy. ^^Dr. Takahashi 's 
views were,*' said an authority on things Jap- 
anese, ^'expressed with an ability that was rare, 
and displayed a wide knowledge of affairs. *' 
His views gave an interesting insight into the 
not uncommon combination in Japan of extreme 
insularity with unbounded Imperialism. 

As I met more than one publicist, professor 
or soldier in Japan who held the views — or most 
of them — that were put forward in Dr. Taka- 
hashi 's symposium, the following summary of 
its salient features will give the concrete ideas 
of many prominent thinkers in Japan : 

No disarmament scheme, even should a world 
concert of the Powers endorse it, would be ac- 
ceptable to Japan. The peace of the Far East 
is in Japan 's keeping, and she can only be sure 
of herself as custodian of and guardian over it 
so long as she keeps her sword bright and loose 
in the scabbard. Japan should have a place 



52 Japan or Germany 

among the world Powers, a voice at the Peace 
Conference when it comes. More, Japan 's voice 
should, at that conference, be an equal one with 
that of any great Power. In the settlement of 
questions relating to the Far East and the 
mastery of the Pacific, Japan's voice should not 
only be equal, but predominant — should be 
heard above that of her partners. Japan's part 
in the war is by no means negligible. She is 
keeping guard over the whole of the Pacific and 
Indian Oceans and a large part of the continent 
of Asia, so as to leave the Allies free to fight 
the enemy elsewhere. Her fleet is in the Medi- 
teranean. Japan should, the war over, keep 
Kiao-chow and all Germany's possessions 
among the Islands of the Pacific. That Japan 
should have an entirely undisputed hegemony of 
Eastern Asia and the Pacific Islands is an essen- 
tial to that keeping the peace in the Orient 
which is Japan's high mission among nations. 
China must be protected. Japan may take over 
Germany's rights there, but otherwise no en- 
croachments on Chinese soil must be permitted, 
least of all by Germany. If Germany obtained a 
new port in China it would *^make the present 
war meaningless. ' ' For that matter, no country 
should obtain any fresh hold on China, except 
that Japan should hold what she won from the 



More about Japan 53 

enemy — that it happens to be on Chinese soil 
is a mere circumstance. China's affairs would 
be settled at the Peace Conference, but China's 
voice there would be a minor quantity. Always 
in the foreground is the thought of Japan's 
great sacrifices for China — her sacrifice in Man- 
churia when she fought Russia, her sacrifice in 
Kiao-chow when she fought Germany. That 
China did not ask Japan to fight in either in- 
stance, and that Japan, in each case, held what 
she had won, or hopes to do so, makes her ef- 
forts no less a sacrifice. She paid a price to 
free parts of China from the foreigner, and 
though China has just as little, or less, to say 
about these localities, and Japan's voice there 
has drowned out all other voices, that is all part 
of her great policy of keeping the peace of the 
Far East. It is the realisation of her duty, 
her mission as a nation, that leads Japan along- 
such roads. 

So much for Dr. Takahashi and his theories. 
Many a Japanese publicist stands with him on 
that platform. Many an influential, thinking 
Japanese considered in 1918 that should 
Japan's soldiers go to Siberia or to Russia to 
fight for the Allies, the peace of the Far East 
would demand many things which we Western- 
ers would not connect with it. With the Taka- 



54 Japan or Germany 

hashis to the fore, it would be easier to get the 
Japanese army into occupation of Far Eastern 
territory than out of it. And the Takahashis 
are not so negligible a quantity in Japanese life 
that we can afford to altogether forget them. 

Among the army men in Japan the mere men- 
tion of the possibility that they might take part 
in the actual fighting was a tonic. They are 
more than keen to get into the war in real 
earnest. 

A Japanese officer of high rank told me that 
he considered Japan's sending an army to Si- 
beria would be the finest thing that could pos- 
sibly happen to Japan, as he thought that such 
a step would be sure to eventually lead to the 
Japanese forces engaging the German army 
** somewhere further to the West.'' 

**The other nations are becoming stronger, 
not weaker, by participation in the war," he 
said. *^Only Russia is weaker, and she has lost 
her strength through abandoning the struggle. 
Japan will be stronger for fighting. Japan 
must, too, ever bear in mind that a maintenance 
of her military strength is as necessary to her 
as the breath of life to her people. What would 
Japan be without armies and armaments! 

*^Ours is an Island Empire. Do not forget 
that. We have too little raw material to suit 



More about Japan 55 

us. To us, command of the sea is vital. If we 
should lose that to an enemy, our days as a 
Power would be numbered. We must not only 
maintain a strong navy, but we must continue 
to be allied to the strongest naval Power. 

^^Sea-control must be our first thought. 
America, Russia, even China, are stronger than 
we from the standpoint of actual territory and 
resources. We have beaten China. We have 
beaten Russia. We proved the value of our 
army. Had we not done so we could not have 
made the Alliance with Great Britain which is 
the rock on which the whole structure of our 
security is built. England would not have given 
us an Alliance which promised us the aid of the 
most powerful navy on the seas unless we had 
something to offer in return. We had our 
army. We could look after matters here in 
the Orient. 

^*We proved that, to some extent, at Kiao- 
chow. We must prove it further in Siberia, and 
in Russia, if necessary. Many Japanese talk 
about our trade with this country and with that 
as though it is a matter of life or death. So it 
may be. Much more serious to Japan than to 
other countries is the necessity of keeping open 
the lines over which must come to us those raw 



56 Japan or Germany 

materials without which we could not wage 
war. * ' 

The General took a book from his library- 
shelf and read to me a few paragraphs from the 
pen of a noted publicist of the Japan of half a 
hundred years ago, one Hashimoto. 

Hashimoto's argument was that Japan was 
too weak to stand by herself as an independent 
nation. He declared that Japan must develop 
herself in Korea, in Manchuria, in California 
and in some parts of China. The Ching Dy- 
nasty had such strength at that time in China 
that the Japanese expansion in that direction 
seemed blocked, so Hashimoto advised his 
country to look further west, toward India. 
Until the day Japan had, by permeating into 
such other lands, gained the benefit of trade and 
the supply of raw materials from them, Japan, 
Hashimoto averred, would never be really in- 
dependent. In addition to this advice, Hashi- 
moto advocated an Alliance with either England 
or Eussia. 

*^That man was a seer,'' said the General. 
^^What he said fifty years ago holds good to- 
day. Japan must be friendly — ^must have Al- 
lies. Without them she is in a precarious posi- 
tion at once. We could always defend Japan 
from invasion, but oversea commerce is as nee- 



More about Japan 57 

essary to our business life as the import of sup- 
plies is necessary to our military operations. Of 
what use would it be to us to be impregnable if 
we were stifled by some sea-power 's hand on our 
trade arteries 1 It is plain we must have Allies. 
It is equally plain we must possess some asset 
to give them in return. We are that asset," he 
said, rising and striking his breast. *^We — the 
army. We are strong and ready to fight. Rus- 
sia is done. Germany will press for the Rus- 
sian Far East, maybe, or at least she will strive 
to get the stores gathered there. We will keep 
Siberia from the Germans. We will keep the 
stores from the Germans. We want to do it. 
It is the justification of our very existence that 
we do it. It is vital that we play some part — 
something more, something greater than we 
have yet done. A blow struck by us at Ger- 
many in this war, is a blow struck for our own 
national security. My countr^nnen don't all see 
it that way, but it's plain enough, if you have 
your eyes open. I can see it." 

So could I. 

He was right — the General. And further, 
Count Terauchi himself would agree with every 
word the General had spoken. 

Security. Japan fought two wars for it. Did 
she get it? She obtained temporary security. 



58 Japan or Germany 

Permanent security she can never have, except 
at the cost of constant vigilance. Her policies 
mnst be determined by that necessity for se- 
curity. Never did Japan have a better chance 
to cement her security a bit tighter than she 
has to-day. I believe she sees that^ — her leaders 
see it. She will act accordingly. Not for busi- 
ness and connnercial gain only. Not for money, 
though she is too poor a nation to leave pay- 
ment of the bill out of account. But for secur- 
ity, first, last and all the time — that is the 
motive that will drive Japan and is equally the 
motive that will ensure that Japan will play 
the game, cleanly, in the manner of a truly great 
little Power. 

Before I left Tokyo, I spoke, on Sunday af- 
ternoon, to several hundred Japanese students 
at the Young Men's Christian Association. I 
talked to them about the war, what it had meant 
to the boys of France and of England, what it 
was to mean in the very near future to hundreds 
and thousands, one day to millions, of the boys 
of America. 

**I am genuinely sorry for the boys of Ja- 
pan, '^ I told them, ^'because Japan's armies are 
not in the field. All the wonderful development 
of character, all the splendid opportunities for 
self-sacrifice, that the young manhood of the 



More about Japan 59 

Western world is reaping from the war-game 
is going to be missed by Japan, it seems Japan's 
boys would ripen and become men under that 
terrible test of fire through which the flower of 
the youth of France and England have passed. 
The old spirit of Bushido, the fierce loyalty to 
Emperor and country, the Spartan simplicity 
and clean, high spirit of the days of Old Japan 
would shine out in the young Japan of to-day, 
mellowed and enriched by something higher, 
something better, that comes sometimes to 
brave, young hearts fighting for a cause that 
contains no selfishness, no desire for gain or 
plunder or reward. ' ' 

**This is a day of high ideals and clean in- 
tent, '^ I told them. **The bigness of the game 
is beyond conception. It is so big it takes a 
boy and wraps him round until a light comes 
to his eyes, humble unit of the great whole that 
he feels himself to be, that is like the light that 
has shone in the eyes of crusaders and martyrs 
and patriots and heroes since the world began. 
It is only sacrifice and forgetfulness of self 
can put it there. The boys of the Western 
World are fighting for Humanity, for the Right 
and for God. It filters through careless young 
minds, filled with all the zest and fire of youth 
and gives them the touch that makes them great. 



6o Japan or Germany 

They all become heroes. They all become great. 
Would to God Japan's young manhood could 
feel the touch of that master-hand — what a day 
it would be for Japan.'' 

When I had finished I went among the stu- 
dents, and chatted with some of them. One af- 
ter another came to me, there and afterwards 
at my hotel and said that they felt the truth of 
what I had told them. 

Sometimes a sudden hand clasp, sometimes 
the glint of a tear showed depth of emotion that 
words could not express. The boys of Japan, 
student boys, think deeply on such subjects, 
more deeply, perhaps, than most Japanese peo- 
ple realize. 

One fine young fellow who talked long with 
me about the war said, ''We are beginning to 
see that Japan has more at stake in this world- 
war than we knew. Japan has never really been 
in the war. We can learn enough from what 
we read about France and England to get that 
idea. Japan's heart is not in the war, — not yet. 
But is it not possible that the day may come 
when Japan will play a bigger part? Believe 
me, we boys would welcome it. We can see that 
the outcome of this war means all the difference 
to Japan — all the difference between going 
ahead and going back. Japan to-day stands 



More about Japan 6i 

divided between two schools. Years ago the old 
civilisation of Japan was condemned by the 
advanced school and a stampede was made to 
throw out things Japanese and adopt things 
Western in their stead. Naturally, materialism 
from the West came to us with the better ele- 
ments of the new civilisation Japan was trying 
to absorb. The pendulum swung far, only to 
start back. A cult sprung up to save the old 
Japanese fashions and institutions. To-day 
Japan is puzzled. Her daily life is in a chaotic 
state. She is Japanese here and foreign there 
and often in a sad jumble in between. Her 
adoption of Western Civilisation has had a 
check. The war is on. It's a war between Lib- 
eralism and Militarism. In Japan there are 
Liberals and Militarists watching. The winning 
of the war by the Allies will mean almost as 
much to Japan and Japan's future progress as 
to that of any nation— perhaps more than to 
some. Western Civilisation, Japan thinks, is 
being tried, sorely tried. Will it stand the test? 
You can see, then, what it means to those of us 
who are sure Liberalism is right and Militarism 
is wrong. We are worried about the outcome. 
It means much to us. If we could only take a 
hand. If we could only help.'' 



62 Japan or Germany 

Splendid boy! His words came from his heart. 
Who would not be glad, for the sake of him and 
his fellows, to see the Sun-Flag in the forefront 
of the fighting? 



CONCERNING SIBERIA 



CHAPTER IV 

CONCEENING SiBERIA 

What has Japan done to better herself in 
Korea and Manchuria? She has developed Ko- 
rea and worked great good there. She has 
brought no little agricultural prosperity to 
Manchuria. She has reached out to the North 
and practically concluded a deal with Russia, 
whereby her influence in Manchuria will shortly 
extend to Harbin, and include the finest dis- 
trict for the growing of the soya bean, the basis 
of the greatest industry in all Manchuria. 

But while Japan is slowly developing Korea 
and Manchuria, a larger potential market lies 
in Siberia. Harbin, too, offers possibilities in 
itself. That the Japanese realise this can be 
judged from the fact that before the war there 
were very few Japanese in Harbin, but at the 
present time they are there in continually in- 
creasing numbers. 

Japan's eyes have long been on the Russian 
Far East as a possible sphere of commercial 

65 



66 Japan or Germany 

development. Every opportunity was taken 
during the past few years to ship Japanese 
goods into Russia. Only Russia's dire neces- 
sity, however, ever allowed her to deal exten- 
sively with her former antagonist. The War 
of 1904-1905 was fought too far distant from 
Russia proper to take hold on the minds and 
imagination of the people of Western Russia 
to the extent to which it did among the Russian 
population in Siberia. The Japanese, since the 
Russo-Japanese War, have been feared and 
hated strenuously in the Russian Far East. Not 
one overt act can be laid to Japan's door dur- 
ing the present war which would in any way 
justify the feeling that permeates Siberia to 
the effect that Japan wishes to snap up the 
Pri-Amur. 

That the Japanese would come to Siberia, ag- 
gressively, some day, was a statement I heard 
from many quarters in the Pri-Amur district. 
Up to the time of the revolution in Russia, and 
for many months afterwards, there was a com- 
paratively satisfactory state of affairs existing 
throughout Siberia. The explanation of the 
more favourable conditions which prevailed in 
that region might be sought in Siberia's favour- 
able economic position. There was no food 
shortage in Siberia worth taking into account. 



Concerning Siberia 67 

Sugar had been hard to obtain at times, but 
otherwise no staple commodity had given out. 
Flour, vegetables and meat had always been 
fairly plentiful. Prices had risen very consid- 
erably. It w^as probably fair to say that the 
cost of living in some of the towns in Siberia 
was approximately double what it was before 
the war. On the other hand, wages had been 
generally higher and the working people had 
therefore never been seriously affected by the 
rise in the price of foodstuffs. The peasantry 
had pleanty of means of subsistence at hand 
and felt the war less than might have been 
thought. This condition of comparative se- 
curity and prosperity had much to do with the 
failure of the extreme Socialist group to arouse 
full sympathy in the Russian Far East, when 
they came from Petrograd with their ultra- 
radical ideas and tried to implant them in Si- 
beria. A population which is prosperous or 
which, at least, is not dogged by famine, is 
hardly likely to have any violent desire to upset 
the existing order of things. The Siberians 
seemed to me to be content w^ith an orderly 
method of existence. 

Siberia is a long way from Petrograd and 
Moscow. Its people are more independent and 
more developed politically than the people of 



68 Japan or Germany 

European Kussia. Men in Eastern Siberia 
could always be found who could look upon the 
war dispassionately. They were far removed 
from it. They could, being used to greater free- 
dom and a broader outlook, reason better for 
themselves and offer a firmer resistance to per- 
nicious doctrines. 

But to a man, they held that obsession about 
Japan. To understand it and appreciate it, 
one had to go into the history of the Govern- 
ment of Siberia before the present war. 

When the news of the revolution in Petro- 
grad in 1917 was flashed over the long line of 
wires that stretched across Siberia, to far Vlad- 
ivostok and the seat of Government in Haba- 
rovsk, the Governor-General of the Pri-Amur 
was Nikolai L 'vovitch Gondatti. 

A study of this man and his influence as 
Governor-General of the Eastern part of Si- 
beria throws many side-lights on the condi- 
tions that existed in the Far Northeast when 
the rule of the Romanoffs ended. 

Nikolai Gondatti was a native of Moscow. 
Little is known of his parentage. He came of 
humble people — peasantry. Adopted in his 
early youth by a rich man, fortune favoured 
Gondatti with an education. From the outset he 
showed remarkable ability as a student. His 



Concerning Siberia 69 

school days finished, he embarked on a career 
as a teacher under the employment of the Im- 
migration Department. 

It was in this capacity that he first came to 
Siberia. 

He had not long been in the Far Northeast 
before his ability allowed him to push his way 
through the lower strata of officials. He was 
an indefatigable worker and climbed rapidly. 

Stolypin marked Gondatti as a useful subor- 
dinate and later the young official became an un- 
doubted favourite of Stolypin. To that astute 
politician Gondatti owed much of his success in 
official life. 

As the years passed one rise after another 
culminated in Gondatti 's appointment to the 
Governorship of Tomsk. This post suited him 
and gave him opportunity for showing his grow- 
ing capacity as an administrator. He became 
noted for holding views of marked democratic 
tendency, and as a politician gained followers 
from the broad-minded standpoint with which 
he viewed local and national affairs. 

Then came the appointment of the Inter-de- 
partmental commission, known as the Amur 
Expedition. This was in 1910. This commis- 
sion was composed of able men and much im- 
portance was placed upon its prospective work. 



70 Japan or Germany 

Gondatti was chosen as its president. This 
meant a year or two of work, in which he could 
show to the full advantage his knowledge of the 
Far Northeast and which, in turn, gave him op- 
portunity for investigation which would make 
him the best-informed man in the world on the 
subject of Siberia. 

The primary importance of the Amur Ex- 
pedition was that the spirit behind it and the 
real object for which it was created were to lay 
the foundations for a tight in the Far East 
against Japan. This fight was to be a bloodless 
campaign, but was none the less carefully 
planned, nor was its importance to the Eussians 
more negligible on that account. 

Stolypin had always realised the fact that 
the only way that Russia could offset the de- 
velopment of Japan in Manchuria and prevent 
Japan's commercial encroachment north of 
Harbin, was to build up a solid Russian com- 
munity in the Pri-Amur district. The power of 
Russia in the Far Northeast depended upon the 
success of Russia's colonisation schemes and 
projects for development in that part of the 
world. 

The extent of the work of the Amur Ex- 
pedition, which was guided by Gondatti 's capa- 
ble hand, covered every subject Avhich could 



Concerning Siberia 71 

have a remote bearing on Russian progress. Not 
only questions of immigration and land settle- 
ment, but details as to agriculture and stock- 
raising occupied much of the time of the com- 
mission. Every possible phase of prospective 
industries, a careful study of the geology of 
the district, as well as its botany, went hand in 
hand with investigations as to the development 
of transportation on land and water. The edu- 
cation and enlightenment of the people by means 
of schools and newspapers were given careful 
consideration. The subjects of shipping and 
fisheries were not forgotten. 

The report of the Amur Expedition, in short, 
covers exhaustively and in detail practically 
every subject in which any one interested in 
Siberia might wish to delve. 

Gondatti's personal characteristics were well 
suited to such work. He had a charming per- 
sonality and carried himself with a simplicity 
that won those with whom he came into contact. 
His views became increasingly democratic, as 
he came into closer touch with the people, and 
there was no section of tlie population which 
he did not have an opportunity of studying at 
first hand. 

At that time the Governor-General of the 
Pri-Amur was General Unterberger who had 



72 Japan or Germany 

been either Governor or Governor-General of 
the district for more than a score of years. As 
might be imagined, General Unterberger was 
wedded to the old regime and was just pure 
bureaucrat to his finger-tips. 

Before Gondatti's work on the Amur Expe- 
dition was concluded the more important men 
in the Far Northeast began to express the hope 
that he might be appointed successor to Unter- 
berger, who had reached an age which made 
it sure that he would drift out of office not long 
thereafter. 

Toward the end of 1911, Unterberger retired 
and the news came to Siberia that Gondatti had 
been made Governor-General in his place. There 
was universal rejoicing at this appointment. A 
positive enthusiasm swept over those whose 
hearts were in the work of developing the Rus- 
sian Far East. These men felt that they were 
on the threshold of a new era. At last the old 
bureaucratic chains were to be knocked from 
the limbs of the strong young country and 
progress was to be assured. There was a uni- 
versal confidence that under Gondatti 's Gov- 
ernor-Generalship industries would be estab- 
lished, mining would be developed, railways 
would be built, waterways improved, the gov- 
ernment of the country would be better organ- 



Concerning Siberia 73 

ised, and the old faults of administration would 
be wiped out. New vigour and new life were in- 
fused into the community. Men who had strug- 
gled along under the impossible conditions 
which had obtained for so many years felt that 
a man who recognised the human element — a 
man who had himself come from the people — 
a man of marked democratic tendencies and of 
broad, sympathetic viewpoint — had come into 
power and that his very presence in the seat of 
authority gave sure promise of reform. 

Alas for such hopes ! In Gondatti's six years 
of office not one of them was realised. The day 
that saw the news reach Siberia of the over- 
throw of the Romanoffs in Petrograd found the 
Russian Far East in worse case than the day 
that marked the appointment of Gondatti as 
Governor-General. The story of that six years 
is one of those disappointing human documents 
which sometimes follow the placing of power in 
the hands of a promising but untried adminis- 
trator. The job was too big for Gondatti. As 
Governor-General of the Pri-Amur he was a 
dismal, tragic failure. 

For the first two or three years the better ele- 
ments among the people in Siberia watched 
Gondatti 's administration with amazement. He 
was always a hard worker and took the greatest 



/ 



74 Japan or Germany 

interest in his duties. He seemed to be genuine- 
ly devoted to the real progress of the country 
and his personal ability showed itself unmis- 
takably to those with whom he came into per- 
sonal contact. No phase of the political situa- 
tion, no detail as to the possible resources of 
the country itself, no bit of information that 
might give him a better insight into and grasp 
of the problems with which he was confronted 
could have been asked from him. He was a 
storehouse of information and had a wonderful 
memory. His charm of manner never failed 
him, and he was always ready on public occa- 
sions as a speaker of marked ability. No one 
came to him with a project into which he would 
not go, and he was easy of access. With all 
this, Gondatti was inherently a politician and 
an office-seeker. He had been so from youth and 
certain characteristics had moulded themselves 
into his character in such a way as to detract 
from his sincerity. Beneath all the smiling ex- 
terior, in spite of the keen intellect with which 
he had been endowed, he was a time-server and 
given to using tools which were unworthy of 
him. 

During the latter part of his administration 
his popularity waned; in fact, the pendulum 
swung the other way. He became known as a 



Concerning Siberia 75 

man who would promise anything, whether or 
not he had the intention of fulfilling his prom- 
ise. He gained the name of a hypocrite. Peo- 
ple who found no difficulty in reaching him and 
who were treated most charmingly by him, came 
away dissatisfied. He was looked upon with a 
general feeling of distrust. While he would talk 
democracy at length and with great freedom, 
his actions were declared to be undemocratic. 
Many of the old bureaucratic faults were al- 
lowed to remain in the administration. He was 
not above personal petty feuds. Here and there 
he showed spite in his dealings with those whom 
he did not like. Above all that led to the 
eventual dislike in which he was held by the 
people was the fact that his subordinates and 
mercenaries were the last class with whom he 
should have surrounded himself. Any means 
to obtain his ends seemed to be excused to him 
if he thought them the best medium toward a 
successful prosecution of his desires. 

Stupid and dishonest officials thrived in 
some quarters under him. Never in the 
history of the Pri-Amur had the police been so 
utterly corrupt and so absolutely incompetent. 

Thus his star, which had risen so rapidly and 
so brilliantly, began to wane as he was tried 
and found wanting. The pity of it was that 



76 Japan or Germany 

that star was, too, the star of the Russian Far 
East. The precious years went by. Opportun- 
ities that were never to be regained were lost. 
The genuine spirit of desire for co-operation 
and reorganisation of the great Far Northeast 
by Russia was sacrificed on the altar of Gon- 
datti's personal ambition and mistaken poli- 
cies. The man was too small for his task. 

The peculiarity of this situation was rendered 
the more great from the fact that Gondatti 
started out in his career as Governor-General 
immensely popular with every class, and though 
his object in view was one with which all those 
about him were in sympathy — for all the people 
recognised Russia's necessities in this regard 
— ^he roused the actual antagonism of the vast 
majority of the people in the region. 

The real root of the trouble, to be as chari- 
table to Gondatti as possible, probably lay in 
the fact that he was incapable of realising that 
many of the reforms which he would have liked 
to effect could not be brought about so quickly 
as he wished. He moved too rapidly along cer- 
tain lines, where the revolutionary character 
of his efforts proved their own undoing and at 
the same time failed signally to move with suf- 
ficient rapidity along many minor lines of re- 
form, which his time-serving tendencies ap- 



Concerning Siberia 77 

parently prevented him from handling without 
gloves. 

One attribute possessed by Gondatti has never 
been disputed. He was rabidly anti-Japanese. 
He left no stone unturned to block the Japanese 
wherever he could, and was ever fearful of their 
progress and advancement in the Far East. He 
resented bitterly any efforts of the Japanese to 
penetrate commercially into Siberia, and was 
ever at loggerheads with Japan over w^hat he 
termed its unwarrantable interference with and 
encroachment upon Russian fishing interests. 

A study of Gondatti 's three pet projects, none 
of which were brought to a successful consum- 
mation, shows the general trend of Russian ef- 
fort in the Far Northeast, and from them may 
be gained valuable lessons as regards the fu- 
ture of Siberia. 

Gondatti 's three attempted achievements 
were his effort to eliminate alien labour — ^with 
particular reference to the Chinese — his scheme 
for the deepening of the Amur Estuary, and his 
project for the imposition of a duty on imported 
wheat. 

Gondatti was obsessed with the idea that the 
best way to develop Siberia was to shut out 
alien labour and thus increase the numbers of 
the Russian labouring population the more rap- 



78 Japan or Germany 

idly. Had Gondatti been somewhat more broad- 
minded in his handling of this subject, he would 
have realized that during the few years of his 
Governor-Generalship he could do little more 
than to start the elimination of alien labour and 
that the continuation of such process must of 
necessity go hand in hand with the growth of 
the Russian population. To rob a community of 
the great blessing of cheap and efficient labour, 
particularly when no other sort of labour is at 
hand to take its place, can have little other ef- 
fect on the employer class throughout the com- 
munity than to arouse in it a very deep sense 
of antagonism. Throughout Siberia there is 
hardly a class which did not view with suspicion 
and disapproval Gondatti ^s plans to exclude 
Chinese labour from the Pri-Amur district. 
The exclusion was to apply to the Koreans as 
well. That the employers of labour in the com- 
mercial community, and particularly the mine 
owners, should be inconvenienced by this was 
inevitable. Gondatti undoubtedly expected their 
opposition. Curiously, however, the one class 
of people with whom the scheme might have 
been expected to have found favour was equally 
opposed to it. The tillers of the soil through- 
out the Russian Far East, never very indus- 
trious themselves, had found they could use 



Concerning Siberia 79 

Chinese and Koreans in cultivating the land, 
and while so doing gain a respite from many 
of the more arduous phases of agricultural in- 
dustry, and yet make both ends meet. To take 
from them the cheap labour which allowed them 
to indulge a natural propensity for an easy- 
going life, was to them anathema. Thus Gon- 
datti found no sympathisers for the exclusion 
of Chinese and Korean labour, and his insis- 
tence upon it created a great deal of animosity 
against his administration. When the war broke 
out in 1914 the machinery for the exclusion of 
alien labour in Siberia had not been completed 
and Gondatti apparently decided to mark time, 
so far as that project was concerned, until peace 
had come again. 

A large amount of Gondatti ^s time and en- 
ergy was devoted to the most ambitious of his 
proposed public works — the deepening of the 
Tartar Straits. The town and Port of Niko- 
laievsk would have undoubtedly benefitted had 
Gondatti 's scheme for the deepening of the 
Straits been carried through, but such benefit 
would have been obtained at a cost which was 
out of all proportion. The credits that Gon- 
datti obtained and the amount of money that 
he wasted in this connection aroused much con- 
demnation from engineering and business 



8o Japan or Germany 

sources, and some general suspicion as to 
whether or not the money expended was being 
done so without some ulterior reason behind the 
expenditure. It might be noted in passing that 
a practical way exists of utilising the Amur 
Eiver as a waterway and connecting it with a 
seaport. This would embody the consideration 
of de Castries Bay as a port instead of Niko- 
laievsk, thus avoiding the Straits of Tartary 
and the lower Amur. A canal through the 
Zizzi Lakes prevents no engineering difficul- 
ties which are in the least insurmountable. 

The third one of Gondatti's pet schemes was 
never put into operation. Had the European 
war not taken place Gondatti would undoubt- 
edly have forced it through. This scheme was a 
proposed duty to be levied on all wheat im- 
ported into Russia. The exact amount of the 
duty which Gondatti wished to impose was 
thirty kopecs per pood. The primary and fun- 
damental reason for this duty was stated by 
Gondatti to be the encouragement of agricul- 
ture in the Pri-Amur. It is difficult to find two 
men in Siberia who agree on the various phases 
of this question. The general division of the 
community for and against this measure was 
the adhesion to it and support of it by the agri- 
culturists and the venomous and bitter antag- 



Concerning Siberia 8i 

onism to it on the part of the milling interests. 
The exchision of Manchurian grain from Si- 
beria spelled rnin to some of the milling com- 
panies which had been formed for the express 
purpose of handling that particular trade. The 
milling industry is the foremost industry, and 
practically the sole extensive one, in Siberia. 

Some people consider that the Pri-Amur 
would be a splendid place for the extensive rais- 
ing of wheat ; others condemn the country as be- 
ing anything but rich from an agricultural 
standpoint and argue that crops are particu- 
larly liable to disease and to damage by flood. 
Be that as it may, the proposal seemed to create 
a greater measure of opposition among those 
who were antagonistic to it than the relative 
support it had gained from those with whom 
it found favour. It certainly added to Gondatti's 
unpopularity, and the distrust in which the 
Governor-General was held. 

Such, then, was the general political condi- 
tion in Far Eastern Russia when the news came 
to Siberia of the revolution in Petrograd. 

Gondatti was in Vladivostok with General 
Nischenkoff, the Commander-in-Chief of the 
Russian forces in the Far East. 



THE REVOLUTION COMES TO 
THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST 



CHAPTER V 

The Revolution Comes to the Russian Far 

East 

News of the revolution in Petrograd could 
hardly have been a great shock to any Russian. 
The Revolution of 1905 had followed the realis- 
ation on the part of the great mass of the Rus- 
sian people that they had been betrayed by the 
manner in which the Russian-Japanese War 
had been waged and ended. It was only lack 
of cohesion and organisation, as well as lack of 
competent leaders, that prevented the Revolu- 
tion in 1905 from developing into a much more 
serious affair for the Romanoff regime than it 
proved to be. Those who knew Russia well 
saw this and felt that another great betrayal 
had only to be followed by a national realisation 
of it, in order to start the fires of revolution 
afresh. 

The day the message came to Vladivostok to 
the effect that the revolution had taken place, 
Gondatti called a council of the higher officials. 

85 



86 Japan or Germany 

It was there decided to give the news to the 
public without delay. It was, perhaps, unfor- 
tunate for Gondatti that at the psychological 
moment he was absent from the seat of govern- 
ment in Habarovsk. He lost no time returning 
from Vladivostok, but before he could reach 
Habarovsk, mischief had been set afoot. 

In the absence of both the Governor-General 
and the Commander-in-Chief of the forces, the 
extreme radical element in Habarovsk was 
given an opportunity to form a committee and 
assume authority. 

Therefore, when Gondatti and General Nisch- 
enkoff reached Habarovsk they were at once 
arrested by the Revolutionary Committee and 
placed in the military prison. Gondatti 's house 
was searched and every document and paper 
therein was subjected to a minute examination. 
All sorts of stories were spread about Siberia 
as to what was found in Gondatti 's house. One 
report said that eleven poods of gold were se- 
creted there. The basis for this story was that 
Gondatti 's visits to the various mines in the 
district frequently resulted in his receipt of 
presents of specimen nuggets. The rumour 
started with some casual remark about these 
sample bits of the products of Siberian gold 
mines and grew into a weird story, from which 



Revolution Comes to Russia 87 

one might gather that a huge store of gold had 
been found in Gondatti's house. 

Another tale which was widely circulated was 
to the effect that a large amount of opium was 
found concealed on Gondatti's premises. This 
started tongues a-wagging everywhere. Some 
opium had been confiscated from smugglers a 
short time before the revolution and Gondatti 
was taking charge of it until it could be for- 
warded for the needs of the Russian Red Cross, 
but this fact was unknown to the average man 
in the community. Hundreds of other rumours, 
many of them absolutely groundless, flew from 
lip to lip, until the animosity toward Gondatti 
had become universal. 

Petrograd, as soon as it learned that the Gov- 
ernor-General had been placed in prison, im- 
mediately ordered his release. The committee 
treated this communication from the revolu- 
tionary government with complete defiance. In- 
stead of being released, Gondatti was trans- 
ferred to the municipal jail and there given 
the treatment of a common criminal. All the 
time orders were coming from the new revolu- 
tionary government to Gondatti, directing him 
to remain at his post. The Habarovsk commit- 
tee consigned such orders to the waste basket 
and Gondatti remained in jail. Such a condi- 



88 Japan or Germany 

tion of things existed for more than two months. 
At last Petrograd commenced demanding Gon- 
datti's presence at the Capitol. These demands 
became insistent and the committee ultimately 
decided to despatch Gondatti to Petrograd. The 
manner of his going was in sad contrast to the 
way he had been welcomed as Governor-General 
so few years previously. The Habarovsk com- 
mittee compelled him to go on foot to the rail- 
way station, and all the way from the jail the 
people crowded the streets and jeered at the 
former Governor-General and heaped insults 
upon him. The very men who should have felt 
the greatest sympathy for and gratitude to Gon- 
datti, engineered the storm of passion that rose 
against him among the worst elements of the 
community. They even went so far as to gather 
together a mob of low moral and intellectual 
calibre to insure ill-treatment for the depart- 
ing Governor-General, who was sent from Ha- 
barovsk under an armed guard and in a third- 
class compartment. He escaped with his life 
and with little else. 

Little good did Gondatti ever do in Siberia, 
but he left behind him a deep-rooted suspicion 
of the Japanese and a well-fostered spirit of 
antagonism and dislike toward them. He had 



Revolution Comes to Russia 89 

been most strongly opposed to the Japanese 
during his term of office and never lost an op- 
portunity to thwart them. He frequently spoke 
publicly in an apprehensive vein of the results 
of the constant encroachments made by the 
Japanese upon the trade of the country. 

It is astonishing how deep-rooted a feeling 
like the anti-Japanese sentiment in Siberia can 
become. The Russian is so quiet and peaceable, 
so little inclined to bother his head particularly 
about affairs which do not immediately concern 
him, that one hardly expects his likes and dis- 
likes of a people outside his own environment 
to sway him. But the Japanese menace is very 
real to the people of the Pri-Amur. It is a 
country of rumour. Every day news would be 
spread of Japanese troops being in occupation 
at Harbin, or having been landed at Vladivos- 
tok. The most visionary sort of stories were 
always in the air. A Russian from Irkutsk 
told me his wife used the threat of a Japanese 
invasion to quiet the children. 

That the revolutionary element, particularly 
the extreme radicals, were always suspicious 
of some encroachment on Siberian territory 
might be gathered from the fact that when Ad- 
miral Knight went to Vladivostok on the Flag- 
ship Brookltfn, a rumour was started that the 



90 Japan or Germany 

American Government was going to take over 
the Trans-Siberian Railway. The most power- 
ful and prominent Bolsheviki in Vladivostok 
told more than one of us that he not only held 
this opinion, but intended to promulgate it. 
An astute member of the English-speaking com- 
munity arranged that this firebrand should go 
to lunch with Admiral Knight on board the 
Brooklyn, The Russian had the courage of 
his convictions and was as outspoken in the 
Admiral's cabin as he had been in the head- 
quarters of the Soldiers' and Workmen's Depu- 
ties. When Admiral Knight learned that the 
belief was held by many of the Russians that 
the coming of the BrooTdyn was a sure presage 
to American occupation of the railway, he 
placed before the Russian extremist, without 
any delay for special preparation, the exact 
text of the cablegram from the Naval Depart- 
ment in Washington which had taken Admiral 
Knight into Siberian waters with his ship. That 
telegram could not have been better or more 
diplomatically worded had the incident in Vlad- 
ivostok been foreseen. It contained simple 
enough instructions and gave as a reason for 
the visit of the warship to Vladivostok the fact 
that it was desired to demonstrate to the Rus- 
sians the complete friendship for and sym- 



Revolution Comes to Russia 91 

pathy with them of the American Government. 

There was no Japanese Admiral with a wise- 
ly worded cablegram from his Government to 
allay Eussian suspicions in Siberia. For the 
matter of that, however the cablegram from 
Tokyo might have been worded, it would have 
had little efPect in the way of soothing any sus- 
picions that might have been aroused as to Ja- 
pan's intentions. 

The fear of Japan had a good effect on the 
extremists who had such predominant voice in 
the newly formed governmental committees in 
Habarovsk and Vladivostok. The more conser- 
vative elements in the community used that fear 
and played upon it. In Harbin particularly, 
wild action on the part of the Committee of 
Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates was held in 
check more than once by a reminder that any 
serious breaches of the peace would result in 
the coming of Japanese troops from Manchuria 
within a few hours. Matters were quite bad 
enough in Harbin, but they would have been 
infinitely worse but for the proximity of avail- 
able Japanese troops. 

This fear of Japan was very much in evidence 
during the first months of the Russian Revolu- 
tion. In Vladivostok, for instance, the immi- 
nence of a Japanese landing was in every mouth. 



92 Japan or Germany 

It was a blessing, for it instilled fear into the 
nnruly elements. It gave confidence to the pro- 
visional authorities, who soon recognised its 
value, and played on it. It was, in fact, the 
subject of the pious gratitude of the more timid 
among the people, who saw in it a safeguard 
against the worst elements in Siberia. 

For months the Japanese fleet was universally 
believed to be cruising just off the Siberian 
Coast and details of its composition were passed 
from lip to lip in awed whispers. When a small 
Japanese training ship happened to call at 
Vladivostok there was almost a panic. No one 
could be prevailed upon to doubt that she was 
in wireless communication with the Japanese 
naval force outside and prepared to call it into 
the port on the slightest excuse, such as an out- 
break or riot, with a view to the immediate 
military occupation of Vladivostok by the Jap- 
anese. 

I talked with a number of Eussians of several 
classes about the possibility that Japan might 
have to guard the accumulated stores in Vlad- 
ivostok. Nowhere in Siberia did I find a Eus- 
sian in favour of this. It was to discuss this 
question that I walked one day over the wharves 
of Vladivostok and along the paths that lead 
around the shores of the bay, with two Ens- 



Revolution Comes to Russia 93 

sians who were among the most astute and pow- 
erful of the new element that had the reins of 
Government in Vladivostok in its hands. They 
were against Japanese intervention in any form. 
To see over 600,000 tons of cargo piled promis- 
cuously here and there is an experience. An 
inevitable amount of loss and damage had re- 
sulted from the lack of protection which had 
been accorded to the goods. The limited amount 
of warehouse space in Vladivostok had been sup- 
plemented by some 82,000 square feet of go- 
downs, but the greater part of the material gath- 
ered had been piled in the open. 

To walk through those piles on piles of indis- 
pensable materials, most of which had come 
from Japan and America, made one feel that 
some one ought to guard them if there was any 
immediate danger of their falling into the hands 
of the Germans. 

To return to the story of how the Eussian 
Eevolution came to Siberia, General Nischen- 
koff, the Commander-in-Chief, was taken, after 
a few weeks ' confinement in the military prison 
at Habarovsk, to the borders of the Pri-Amur, 
where he was released. In his place the com- 
mittee, which contained a number of soldier 
members, elected a Colonel Vissotsky. Vissot- 
sky was a colonel in the reserves and not in 



94 Japan or Germany 

the regular army. He had once been a banker 
in Vladivostok and was held in little esteem — 
in fact, the greater part of the business element 
in Vladivostok considered him an out-and-out 
scoundrel. He held the position of Commander- 
in-Chief, however, until the Eevolutionary Gov- 
ernment in Petrograd sent General Hagondokoff 
to take the position. Hagondokolf was once 
Governor of the Amur province, and both he and 
his Chief of Staff, DomanyefPsky, are capable 
officers. Vissotsky was deposed from the posi- 
tion of Commander-in-Chief upon Hagondo- 
koff 's arrival, without any difficulty, as the for- 
mer never enjoyed the confidence of either com- 
mittee or army and had no real authority. When 
he issued an order the army would consider it 
and if they agreed with it, obey it ; if not, they 
would forget it. 

While Habarovsk was the capital of the Pri- 
Amur, the committee which had been formed 
there and which had thrown the Governor-Gen- 
eral and the Commander-in-Chief into jail and 
had subsequently turned them out of Siberia, 
was never recognised in Far Eastern Russia as 
being in supreme control. A better group than 
the committee in Habarovsk was the committee 
in Vladivostok, and the fact that Vladivostok 
was at the end of the trans-Siberian railway and 



3 



Revolution Comes to Russia 95 

was the great seaport of the Far Northeast 
made the Vladivostok committee of more real 
importance than the Habarovsk committee. 

The Eussian is an easily governed person. He 
is docile. He will go a long way to escape 
trouble. Any committee that represents itself 
as being the government of the moment finds 
less difficulty in usurping the direction of af- 
fairs than it would find in most other countries. 

The great difficulty which was immediately 
felt in Siberia after the revolution in Russia was 
the labour problem. This was all the more nat- 
ural in view of the fact that the labour problem 
in the Far Northeast has ever been in an unset- 
tled, unsatisfactory state. Gondatti's efforts to 
do away with Chinese and Korean labour and 
the scarcity of Russian labour, together with 
the fact that the Russian is not a particularly 
efficient laboring man in the abstract, each had 
a bearing on the troubles that were to ensue. 
There was no real industry, as such, in the Pri- 
Amur when the revolution came. The flour mil- 
ling industry was the only one which had been 
long established. Gold mining was confined to 
the Zeya and Amgun valleys and had never 
proved particularly remunerative. Gondatti's 
schemes for the development of the other min- 
eral resources of the Pri-Amur had never 



96 Japan or Germany 

reached anything like conclusion. One might 
almost say that, except for the gold mining and 
the mining of zinc at Tintinkhe, there is no 
mining industry in Siberia as yet. Consequent- 
ly, except for the conduct of the railway line 
and such ordinary local industries as may be 
found in every community where good-sized 
towns and cities exist, no sufficient industrial 
life was to be found in the country from which 
to create or support a good-sized and intelli- 
gent body of working men. 

The fact that the soldiers and working men, 
such as they are, with all their limitations, took 
over the government at Vladivostok and did 
as well with it for a time as they did do, is a 
lesson in itself as to the possibilities of rule by 
the people. The effect on the whole Pri-Amur 
district of the attitude and actions of the Vlad- 
ivostok committee was more far-reaching than 
that of the Habarovsk committee. 

Those first days of the Eussian revolution, 
with the continual contradictory orders that 
came to Vladivostok from Petrograd, and with 
that excess of zeal with which a new^ group in 
power feels its first strength, might have pro- 
duced more sinister results. 

The power in Vladivostok was in the hands, 
when the revolution came, of men who were 



Revolution Comes to Russia 97 

known to be henchmen of Gondatti's. The Gov- 
ernor-General at Vladivostok was named Tol- 
matchoff. When the government was taken over 
by a Committee of Public Safety — immediately 
formed on receipt of the news that the old re- 
gime had been superseded in Eussia — Tolmatch- 
off was deprived of his official residence, with 
the exception of one bedroom. He was given 
to understand that his authority had been taken 
over by the committee, although the fact that 
he was a popular man and that the Committee 
of Public Safety itself was formed from quite 
rational elements, protected the Governor-Gen- 
eral from any personal ill-treatment. Tolmatch- 
otf wisely applied at once for leave of absence 
and until it was granted and he left for Petro- 
grad, he kept quietly in the background and took 
no part in the conduct of public affairs. 

The Vice-Governor of Vladivostok, Ternov- 
sky, might have come into prominence at this 
point, except for the fact that he was a great 
favourite of Gondatti^s. That alone proved his 
downfall. As in the instance of the Governor- 
General, there was no bitterness of feeling 
against him and he was not only allowed to re- 
main in Vladivostok but was given an official 
position subsequently under the new regime. 

Vladivostok's Mayor was General Yushtchen- 



98 Japan or Germany 

koff. lie, too, was known as one of Gondatti's 
men, althougli he cut little figure one way or 
the other, as he was a man of no marked in- 
dividuality or ability. In spite of this fact, he 
had been in touch so long with various municipal 
elements in Vladivostok, that he was able to 
gain a hearing with the Committee of Public 
Safety and to induce them to include among 
their numbers some of the more moderate cit- 
izens. Yushtchenkoff hung on long enough to 
effect some real good in this connection. One 
of the results of the Mayor's influence was that 
the Committee of Public Safety which first 
grouped itself around the old Municipal Gov- 
ernment gradually became disassociated from 
the municipality and allowed distinctly civic in- 
terests to be handled by a purely municipal 
body. 

The situation in Vladivostok immediately aft- 
er the outbreak of the revolution was, then, that 
the Committee of Public Safety took over the 
powers of the Governor-General, in spite of the 
fact that Petrograd gave him orders to con- 
tinue in authority. Most of the officials in the 
Government service carried on their work in 
the same way that they had done, except that 
they took orders from the Committee instead 
of the Governor-General. That moderate ele- 



Revolution Comes to Russia 99 

ments were in the Committee was evident from 
the fact that no disturbance occurred in Vlad- 
ivostok and that law and order were very well 
maintained. The very first few hours and days 
of the revolution seemed to hold some menace 
of unruly conditions to come, but a better con- 
dition of things continued and no little common 
sense in administration was shown by the Com- 
mittee. 

Only one incident occurred which showed the 
animus of the new governing power for some 
of the old bureaucratic group. The chief of 
the commercial port of Vladivostok was a Baron 
Toube. A deep feeling against Germany ex- 
isted in the community and considerable popu- 
lar indignation was directed against Toube, on 
account of his Gennan name. Toube was un- 
doubtedly a man of exceptional capability. He 
cared nothing for the opinions of other people, 
however, and was accustomed to running the 
port to suit himself. His methods and man- 
ners were high-handed. 

When the revolution came the feeling against 
Toube took the form of frequent threats against 
his safety and accusations of all sorts of pro- 
German actions on his part. Threats came to 
him by telephone and by anonymous letters. 
Feeling that his safety would be more assured, 



100 Japan or Germany 

he moved his residence to one of the tugs in 
the Bay. That gave his enemies the chance 
for which they had been waiting. An outcry 
at once arose to the effect that Toube was plan- 
ning to escape. His arrest followed the popular 
clamour. The Committee of Public Safety had 
made no other move of this kind and that it 
felt that possible injustice had been done to 
Baron Toube, might be gauged from the fact 
that the Committee explained its action to be 
due to a desire to protect Toube from the peo- 
ple. Dame Rumour immediately became busy. 
Stories to the effect that Toube had manipulated 
the unloading of cargoes in the port in such 
manner that combustible materials had been 
so stored as to invite fire, soon developed into 
statements that goods had actually been de- 
stroyed by Toube in his effort to assist the 
Germans. "While his first incarceration had 
been in the fortress, it soon became necessary 
to transfer him to the common jail. A couple 
of months afterwards, despite the fact that 
many charges had been formed against him and 
there was a strong feeling on the part of the 
Vladivostok people that he should be brought 
to trial for dereliction of duty, better counsels 
prevailed. He was released on bail eventually 
and allowed to leave Siberia for Eussia. 



Revolution Comes to Russia loi 

Thus the revolutionary element took control 
of affairs of government in Siberia, and the 
individuals in whose hands the conduct of af- 
fairs had previously rested drifted out, one 
after another, and left the new element in entire 
control. 

A had administration had left the country in 
anything but a sound industrial condition and 
the work of a Eussian settlement of the Far 
Northeast had been but begun. The resources of 
the country were hardly as yet tapped. The 
day of the Russian Far East could not as yet 
have been said to have reached its dawn. 



NEW HANDS AT THE HELM OF 
GOVERNMENT 



CHAPTER VI 

New Hands at the Helm of Government 

The first Committee of Public Safety formed 
in Vladivostok contained a majority of men who 
were of decidedly moderate tendencies. This 
fact bore fruit in two directions. First, the ac- 
tions of the Committee assumed an importance 
greater than that of any other of the revolu- 
tionary committees in the Russian Far East. 
Second, its initial political complexion was iden- 
tified too closely to the system which had existed 
before the revolution to allow the Committee 
to escape the constant charge on the part of its 
critics of reactionary and bourgeois tendencies. 

Gradually, as the revolution gained impetus 
in Russia and the Bolshevik crew gained more 
and more ascendency, the extreme element in 
the Committee of Public Safety in Vladivostok 
gained ground, until to-day the conservative ele- 
ment has become practically subordinated, if 
not eliminated. In its place there has sprung 
up, however, a semi-conservatism — a sort of 

105 



io6 Japan or Germany 

Minimalist group against the Maximalists, 
which have had the effect of giving some bal- 
ance to the mind and deliberations of the com- 
mittee. 

For several months after the revolution came 
to Siberia, the Committee of Public Safety held 
the reins of government, and considering the 
circumstances under which it was compelled to 
operate and the personnel of its members, it 
is only fair to accord to it — during those early 
days — a considerable element of success as re- 
garded the results of its working. 

One example of its capability was with ref- 
erence to the manner in which it grappled with 
the police problem. Under the old regime the 
police of Vladivostok were worse than useless. 
They were corrupt and a menace to the social 
order of things municipal. The Committee of 
Public Safety immediately replaced the police 
by a militia force. No one, however much they 
could criticise the militia, could argue that they 
were not an improvement on the old police force. 
The maintenance of good order cannot be placed 
solely to the credit of the militia, for all classes 
of the population desired peace and quiet, and 
their continual effort seconded well the efforts 
of the new force. 

The revolution was not many days old when 



At the Helm of Government 107 

the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Depu- 
ties was formed and took a prominent part in 
operations. It worked hand in hand with the 
Committee of Public Safety and some members 
of the former body were taken into the latter. 
The soldiers in Vladivostok during the early 
days of the revolution numbered about thirty 
thousand. There were few workmen, compara- 
tively. The fact that industry in the Pri-Amur 
was undeveloped and that no one firm or estab- 
lishment employed many men, except the Gov- 
ernment Arsenal, made it inevitable that the 
soldiers should be predominant in the Council 
of Soldiers' and Workmen's Deputies. 

The history of that Council in Vladivostok 
would read much the same as the history of 
similar committees in other parts of Russia. 
Immediately upon their formation they passed 
a resolution, declaring that the commandant of 
the fortress could issue no orders before first 
submitting them to the Council for approval. 
Their commanding officer was an old man and 
in bad health. He had little option or inclina- 
tion to quarrel with the mandate of the Council. 
Fortunately for affairs in Vladivostok one or 
two young soldiers, who were eloquent speakers, 
gained the immediate ascendency over their 
comrades, and, still more fortunately, possessed 



io8 Japan or Germany 

no small amount of common sense. These young 
fellows held quite sound opinions, and, but for 
comparatively few instances, the Council of Sol- 
diers' and Workmen's Deputies, so far as its 
decrees which had to do with the soldiers them- 
selves were concerned, took but little action 
that could be described as other than rational. 
When the Council applied its power to the ar- 
bitration or settlement of labour disputes, its 
judgment, as might be expected, was less sound. 
Chief among its labours, however, was the Coun- 
cil's effort to weed out dishonest practices and 
corrupt methods from Kussian officialdom. The 
soldiers' committee was just as keen to detect 
and punish crooked officials of the new regime 
as it would have been to have hounded out cor- 
rupt functionaries of the old bureaucratic group. 

Their own organisation came in for no little 
attention at their hands and when it seemed 
necessary that the militia should be assisted in 
the maintenance of good order, the soldiers 
showed themselves to be willing and ready to 
give such help. 

Their action along one line was somewhat 
amusing and intensely distasteful to the official 
element. The Council desired to have one of 
its own representatives keep active touch with 
all branches of the public service. The work 



At the Helm of Government 109 

of the Customs Officials, the receipt and de- 
spatch of cargo, and questions relating to the 
amount of accommodation for the storage of 
goods and the amount of car space on the rail- 
ways, were items which the Council of Sol- 
diers* and Workmen's Deputies considered vital 
points with which they should come into close 
contact and upon which they should keep a vigi- 
lant eye. The utter and extraordinary ignorance 
of some of the soldiers who were thus appointed 
to watch official operation of one department or 
another produced several amusing situations. 
The object of the Committee and of the men 
themselves, however, was a good one, and pro- 
ductive of good in the main. 

The bourgeoisie and official classes of the old 
day in Siberia could apparently no more work 
with the new element than water could be mixed 
with wine. The evident sincerity of the soldiers 
was entirely misunderstood by the better edu- 
cated classes, who failed more deplorably than 
one would have thought possible. In Siberia, 
as in the rest of Russia, what might usually 
be spoken of as the better element of the pop- 
ulation has shown no initiative, no real patriot- 
ism, and, above all, an entire absence of cour- 
age. Nowhere more patently than in Vlad- 
ivostok could the better element in the com- 



no Japan or Germany 

munity have rendered more signal service and 
sympathetic understanding of and honest en- 
deavour to work with the Council of Soldiers' 
and Workmen's Deputies. In some parts of Rus- 
sia the suspicion with which the bourgeoisie 
were looked upon by the extreme radical ele- 
ment made it seem impossible that any assist- 
ance could be given by them. In Vladivostok 
this was not the case — at least during the early 
days of the revolution. Those who remained 
of the more wealthy and official classes in Vlad- 
ivostok made their primary mistake in creating 
an organisation of their own, which was known 
as ' * The Alliance of Free Russia. ' ' They lacked 
punch and strength and vim, however, and, al- 
though they held meetings at times, in no in- 
stance was there evidence of their having had 
the slightest effect or influence upon the trend 
of events. Their association was subsequently 
disbanded and assimilated with the ** Party of 
National Freedom." 

Early in the game the Government in Petro- 
grad realised that it was necessary to supply 
some one from the central government to try 
to hold Siberia closer to the seat of affairs in 
Russia. The first representative of the new 
government to arrive in Vladivostok was a man 
named Rusanoff, who was a deputy for the 



At the Helm of Government 1 1 1 

Maritime Province of Vladivostok in the Im- 
perial Duma. Eusanoff was appointed by Pet- 
rograd to be Commissioner for the Pri-Amur. 
While he had no great personal authority and 
no practical experience of administration, he 
had the advantage of thorough local knowledge 
and was known to be honest and broad-minded. 
Petrograd made a good selection when they put 
him at the head of affairs, but he was not strong 
enough to really take the reins. The Committee 
of Public Safety co-operated with him to a cer- 
tain extent, but never considered that they 
should take their cue from him. 

Another element that loomed large in the sit- 
uation in Vladivostok was the naval force sta- 
tioned there. The Eussian fleet in the port con- 
sisted only of a half dozen torpedo boats and 
a few small auxiliary vessels. Several thou- 
sand sailors were quartered in the barracks, 
however, and attached to the arsenal. Trouble 
with the sailors might not have ensued except 
for the arrival, during the first month of the 
revolution, of three agitators from the Baltic 
fleet. These devils came to Vladivostok with 
trouble in their hearts. Then it was that the 
sober minds and good common sense of the 
Council of Soldiers' and AVorkmen's Deputies 
was most needed. The firebrands from the Bal- 



112 Japan or Germany 

tic counselled a wholesale massacre of officers. 
The Soldiers ' Deputies soon put a veto on this 
project. The sailors insisted upon the removal 
of the Vice-Admiral, who was Commander-in- 
Chief of the Port, and of the Port Admiral also. 
In the Vice-Admiral's place they elected a Lieu- 
tenant, and an engineer captain was given the 
position of Port Admiral. Here again the in- 
fluence of the Soldiers' Deputies was marked, 
for the appointment of the two new officers were 
sound appointments of good men and Petro- 
grad found no difficulty in confirming them. 

Russian naval officers, as is well known, have 
themselves to thank for the attitude of the Rus- 
sian sailor toward them. Brutality of officers 
toward men was reduced to a fine art in the 
Russian navy. Since the revolution the naval 
officers in Vladivostok have shone in an unen- 
viable light, evidently afraid that retribution 
might be dealt out to them and if their own 
hands were clean that the sins of other officers 
in previous days might cause some punishment 
to fall on their own heads. They have, except 
in very rare instances, shown no adaptability 
whatever to the new conditions. A close ob- 
server told me in Vladivostok that the naval 
officers since the revolution, without exception, 
either exhibited complete subserviency to the 



At the Helm of Government 1 13 

men or that they sulked and tried by all possi- 
ble means to avoid further service in the navy. 
The natural result of this was that the men, 
finding their demands met with no opposition, 
made the most absurd proposals. The Vice- 
Admiral's house, which stands on the main 
street of Vladivostok, was taken over by the 
sailors and turned into a club for their own 
use, and almost any hour of the day or night 
that one passed, one could see them playing 
billiards, their girl friends standing about as 
interested spectators. To make their club a 
success they demanded from the officers ten per 
cent of the officers' pay. This sum is devoted 
to the expenses of the club, and if the officers 
should by any chance venture therein they are 
driven forth with insult and abuse. Under no 
circumstances will the sailors obey orders to 
take the government transport, a fairly busy 
ship, to sea, except on the express condition 
that they will be able to return for Sundays 
and holidays. Should an officer be housed in 
an apartment that the sailors consider too large 
and luxurious for him they summarily evict him 
and compel him to live elsewhere. 

While all these things sound very absurd and 
very lawless and are in themselves inexcusably 
outrageous from one standpoint, the practices of 



114 Japan or Germany 

the officers of the Russian navy in the old Ro- 
manoff days explain the spirit behind them. In 
spite of these excesses the sailors maintained 
order amongst themselves in Vladivostok and 
were not slow to punish drunkenness and other 
offences committed by their comrades. Certain 
it is that they preserved an orderly demeanour 
in the streets. Always among the sailors can 
be found extreme anarchists and their follow- 
ing ebbs and flows in accordance with their in- 
dividual ability to hold sway over their fellows. 
For the most part the sailors in Vladivostok 
were inclined to be loyal to the temporary gov- 
ernment. They were incredibly lazy, but that 
is an attribute by no means unusual in Rus- 
sians. I saw but few of them that could be 
characterised as slovenly or dirty. 

The influence of the Soldiers' and Workmen's 
Council and its desire for clean administration 
might be gauged from what befell General Saga- 
tovsky, who commanded the artillery of the port, 
appointed by the Soldiers' Deputies to succeed 
General Kriloff, who was the Commander-in- 
Chief at Vladivostok at the time of the revolu- 
tion. In spite of the fact that General Saga- 
tovsky was the nominee of the Soldiers' Depu- 
ties, he was not in the position of Commander- 
in-Chief many weeks before certain malprac- 



At the Helm of Government 115 

tices were discovered, which were traced to him. 
At once he was deposed and placed under ar- 
rest, where he was held for many long months. 

The transition that the minds of the Russian 
oldiers in Vladivostok went through during the 
early days of the revolution was an interesting 
study in psychology. At first they seemed to 
be wrapped in a fine glow of enthusiasm. High 
ideals were not uncommonly expressed. They 
felt apparently a fierce flame of patriotism burn- 
ing in their breasts. All were eager to do 
something to help the new cause. They chafed 
under a sense of helplessness, and disappoint- 
ment that they could not do something imme- 
diately constructive to assist the progress of the 
revolution. 

Then this first burst of enthusiasm died out. 
A wave of demoralisation swept over the army. 
Discipline went by the board. Their attitude 
was passive rather than active. They took no 
overt steps and were guilty of no specific ac- 
tions by which they could be particularly con- 
demned. They destroyed no property. They 
were sober as a rule and behaved themselves, 
but it seemed that they had reached the stage 
of *^ don't care.'' Their disorganisation was 
marked. Their personal appearance became 
dirty and slovenly. In short, they ceased to 



Ii6 Japan or Germany 

be soldiers and became a mere disorganised 
mob. 

The poor fellows had no help from their offi- 
cers. The average Russian officer of lower rank 
was a poor stick with no education and little 
intelligence. He rarely had any moral fibre 
whatever. He had not been trained to care for 
his men nor for their welfare and had been 
brutal to them if he pleased, without reproof 
from his superiors. The Russian officer natu- 
rally felt no little fear as how the Russian sol- 
dier was going to look upon him under the new 
conditions. Had the officers, as a class, been 
efficient and courageous, when confronted with 
the moral and psychological problem presented 
by the dying out of the soldiers' enthusiasm, 
they might have been a useful factor in the sit- 
uation. As it was, they were worse than useless. 
Most of them seemed thoroughly cowed. I 
rarely met one and engaged in any kind of con- 
versation with him that the predominant idea 
in his mind was not escape from Russia and 
the Russian army. I do not wish to throw too 
much blame upon him for this, for it was nat- 
ural for the officers to wish to get away, but it 
is deplorable that they were not of better class 
for in Siberia at least clever and conscientious 
work on their part, had they put heart into their 



:i: 



At the Helm of Government 117 

efforts, would have resulted in a much better 
feeling between officers and men. 

As the months passed, the third phase of the 
transition came on. It was to the credit of 
the men themselves that some sort of reforma- 
tion seemed to be working and that it came 
from themselves — from within. This was solely 
due to the fact that in their own numbers there 
were some young fellows who possessed no lit- 
tle common sense and honesty of purpose. Dis- 
cipline of a sort began to reassert itself. It 
was not the old discipline, which was born of 
fear of a heavy fist or a club. It was discipline 
that was being adopted by the men because 
some of the wiser of their own fellows had 
shown them that they were better off under dis- 
cipline, and that they could not be soldiers with- 
out it. True, it didn't go very far. Neverthe- 
less, it was a genuine movement and as such was 
interesting, even in its stages of inception. 
While the men did not salute their officers, they 
bore themselves quite differently to their su- 
periors, and there seemed to be hope of the 
natural enmity that the soldiers had begun to 
have for the officers disappearing in time. One 
has to know the Russian army thoroughly to 
realise how much this meant. The poor Rus- 
sian soldier has had little for which to live. 



Ii8 Japan or Germany 

He has been a brave, hard fighter and no one 
has cared a rap whether he lived or died. What 
probably was brought home to him more for- 
cibly was the fact that nobody cared whether 
he suffered while he was alive. To ask him 
to have any inherent respect or love for his 
superiors or to have any real fundamental ap- 
preciation of the value of discipline and order 
was out of the question. Therefore, when the 
soldiers in Vladivostok began to buck up, smart- 
en themselves, and show by their general bear- 
ing that they were trying to be better soldiers, 
it was concrete evidence of the amount of good 
that can be done among that class of soldiers 
by a little missionary work on the part of those 
who know them and sympathise with them. 

Some units among the soldiers of the Siberian 
army became imbued with a definite anarchis- 
tic view. Some regiments dismissed quite fair- 
ly competent officers and put utterly incompe- 
tent ones in their places. As a whole, however, 
the Eussian soldiers in Siberia, and particu- 
larly in Vladivostok, were by no means anar- 
chists. The anarchists in Vladivostok tried to 
get hold of the soldiers and started a definite 
propaganda with that end in view. A large 
anarchist manifestation was planned in Vlad- 
ivostok, the date for it set, and threats made 



At the Helm of Government 1 19 

that on that occasion the reds would loot the 
offices of a paper which did not agree with their 
sentiments, would ransack and pillage some of 
the larger stores in the toAvn and would arrest 
summarily the members of the Council of the 
Soldiers' and Workmen's Deputies. 

The Council handled this matter splendidly. 
Trustworthy troops with machine guns were 
placed at various quarters about the city, and 
a broad smile illumined the faces of most of the 
men who had been so direly threatened. No 
effort was made to keep the anarchists from 
having their meeting, and have it they did. A 
number of them, including some soldiers, gath- 
ered together and indulged in some oratorical 
fireworks, but the lack of opposition and some 
possible foreboding that the quiet held some 
unknown menace of trouble to come in case they 
*' started something," made them decide to aban- 
don all idea of rioting and disperse peacefully 
when they had run out of adjectives, expletives 
and breath. 

The net result of this meeting was that not 
only the anarchists but the rest of the soldiers, 
and the balance of the population of Vlad- 
ivostok as well, realised that the extremists 
were but a small unimportant minority. 

Thus may be pointed out the good that lies 



120 Japan or Germany 

in some of the soldier elements in Russia. There 
is plenty to criticise. It is perhaps little use 
to either condemn or excuse. The main point 
to be remembered is that the Russian soldier 
offers fine ground for missionary effort. He 
has a lovable personality and is easily swayed. 
He is not entirely unintelligent by any means, 
and while he has little to be patriotic about and 
has never been trained to be industrious, once 
he is convinced that a certain line of action is 
the right one to take, it is not difficult to get 
him to adopt it. He is strangely capable of 
enthusiasm for a project. He has always been 
abused and ill-treated, and since the revolution 
has been fed continuously and everlastingly on 
enough wicked and soulless propaganda to ad- 
dle the brains of wiser men. 

That the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's 
Deputies which, after all, represent the thirty 
thousand soldiers in Vladivostok and which are 
a real power in the community, have co-oper- 
ated with the Committee of Public Safety so 
well as they have done and with so little of bad 
result, is an encouraging feature rather than 
a discouraging one. 



ON DISCIPLINE 



CHAPTER VII 
On Discipline 

A JUNIOE officer of the Russian army who had 
been promoted to a position of some importance 
in Siberia, asked me to dinner one evening. We 
had a long talk about army reorganisation in 
Russia, and about the possibility of the Russian 
soldier of this generation again absorbing any 
ideas of discipline. 

My young friend waxed eloquent in his de- 
nunciation of the type of Russian officer whose 
attitude toward the Russian soldier for many, 
many years was largely responsible for the re- 
sult that no Russian soldier would be likely to 
accord much respect or authority to a Russian 
officer again for a long time to come. 

My experience with the Russian army on dif- 
ferent occasions gave me a groundwork for an 
understanding of my young friend ^s feelings in 
the matter. I remembered a day in China in 
1900 during the Boxer troubles when I had gone 
from Tientsin to Tongku for provender. We 

123 



124 Japan or Germany 

were under heavy bombardment in Tientsin and 
supplies bad run low. We drew lots to see 
which of our quartette of correspondents should 
journey down the Pei-ho and apply to some of 
the ships of the British fleet for permission to 
purchase eatables. The lot fell to me. The 
British officers on the men-of-war in Taku Bay 
were very hospitable and exceedingly kind. 
When I landed from a steam pinnace at Tongku 
on my return journey I was laden with a big 
sack of food and drink. I obtained assistance 
in carrying it to the railway station, which I 
reached just in time to catch the one train of 
the day for Tientsin. 

We had not proceeded more than half of the 
25-mile journey before the train came to a 
standstill and we were ordered out. The engine 
had stopped at a break in the line. A damaged 
bridge which the Chinese troops had destroyed 
was immediately in front of us, and far distant 
the smoke of another engine rose lazily in the 
quiet air. Nearly a mile away was the other 
section of the train for Tientsin and the pas- 
sengers were already scurrying across the in- 
tervening ground. I managed to get my heavy 
load out of the compartment and on to the em- 
bankment in front of the engine. I tried to 
shoulder it before carrying it down the twelve 



On Discipline 125 

or fifteen foot slope that led to the plain be- 
low. I realised that it was too heavy for me 
to carry to the Tientsin section of the train. 
I could not abandon it. It was worth almost 
its weight in gold to me at that moment. I 
turned to a member of the Russian railway 
company, which was hard at work repairing 
the damaged railway bridge in front of us, and 
noticing that he was idle for the moment, asked 
him in my most polite and best Russian if he 
would, for a consideration, assist me to carry 
my load across the break. 

He was a strapping big fellow, that Russian 
soldier. He looked a strong man. Either he 
had gotten out of his bunk on the wrong side 
that morning or his breakfast had disagreed 
with him, for he not only refused to give me 
any assistance, but his refusal was couched in 
very abrupt terms. 

He used an expression at the close of his brief 
remarks, which was not at all the sort of thing 
that he should have said to me. I stood and 
gazed at him for a moment, wondering what I 
could possibly have said which would have 
aroused in him the least feeling of antagonism. 
A hand fell on my shoulder and a Russian ac- 
quaintance, an officer of the staif who spoke 
good English, said to me, ''What is the mat- 



126 Japan or Germany 

terT' I told him briefly. I explained that I 
had meant no harm in wanting to hire the Eus- 
sian soldier to assist me. 

**Did I hear that soldier use such-and-such 
an expression to youf queried the officer. 

**I don't know whether you did or not. I 
did," I replied. 

The officer stepped a couple of paces forward 
and looked straight in the soldier's eyes. The 
latter 's hand went to the vizor of his cap smart- 
ly, and remained in that position. Eussian mil- 
itary discipline demanded that a soldier in the 
presence of an officer kept his hand at the salute 
until he had obtained the officer's permission to 
remove it. With some low exclamation of an- 
noyance, the officer, doubling his fist, smashed 
the soldier squarely in the jaw. The poor fel- 
low's heels were together, and the rail was 
immediately behind him. The blow was no light 
one and it was fair on the jaw. Over the s®l- 
dier went, head over heels,-, down the bank, 
turning at least one complete somersault. 
Scrambling to his feet at the bottom of the slope 
he drew himself up and looked at the officer 
standing on the bank above. From the moment 
he was struck, during all his evolutions down 
the embankment, and again as he rose and 
looked up at the man who had struck him in 



On Discipline 127 

the face, his hand, so far as I could see, had 
hardly once left the vizor of his cap. Russian 
discipline. 

When my young friend in Vladivostok talked 
to me about the abuses to which Russian sol- 
diers had been subjected for so many years, I 
knew what he was talking about. One who has 
been with the Russian army in the field in 
time of war may not realise the extent to which 
the Russian officer in time of peace exerted that 
continual discipline, as he called it, which was 
only another name for legalised brutality. 

I was being rowed out from Port Arthur to 
a big Russian man-of-war anchored in the har- 
bour one day. I was seated on one side of the 
coxswain, and on the other was an intelligent 
and well bom Russian officer of good rank. As 
the sailors swung to their oars and the boat 
shot across the blue waters of the harbour, the 
question of discipline came under discussion. I 
referred to the well-trained crew, whose smart- 
ness seemed to me to be rather unusual in the 
Russian navy, as I knew it. To illustrate just 
what he meant by discipline, the officer turned 
tow^ard the coxswain who was on his left and, 
half rising, struck the man full in the face with 
his clenched fist. I winced as though I had 
been the one struck. The sheer savagery of that 



128 Japan or Germany 

quick blow astounded me. The coxswain was a 
fine type of man. He had a splendid face, and 
he took the blow unflinchingly. The officers 
hard jaw set, and as he saw the horror on my 
face it goaded him to a further exhibition of 
brutality. Again he struck — twice. The blood 
ran down the face of the man at the tiller, but 
he set his lips, and with his eyes straight ahead, 
kept his hands on the tiller ropes. 

I could stand it no longer, and told my Eus- 
sian acquaintance plainly that such was the 
case. When he saw that I had thoroughly lost 
my temper, he regained his former sweet com- 
posure, laughed, and taunted me with having a 
soft heart. *^You would not be one to teach 
discipline in the Eussian navy," he said, with 
a sneer. 

Such pictures come back to me sometimes 
when I see Eussian soldiers that refuse to sa- 
lute their officers, and when there are evidences 
that discipline has become lax, so far as the 
recognition of authority goes among the Eus- 
sian soldiers. 

We had dinner, the young Eussian officer and 
me, with two others of the local Eussian army 
organisation. We dined in a private room. As 
we were chatting after dinner, loud laughter 
came through the folding doors which shut off 



On Discipline 129 

an adjoining room from ours. The boisterous 
shouts from next door increased in volume, un- 
til they interrupted our conversation. 

**Do you recognise the voice?'' asked one of 
the young officers of another. At that they all 
listened and my friend rose, went to the door 
and shouted through it, ^'I hope you're having 
a good time, General.'' There was an answer- 
ing shout from the next room, and after a few 
exchanges of badinage through the closed door, 
it was opened from the other side, and I saw 
the gross form of a man in the uniform of a 
Eussian General seated on a sofa which had 
been drawn a little way from the table. The 
remains of what for Siberia must have been a 
sumptuous repast were still in evidence. The 
General's companions were not from the rec- 
ognised social strata of the community. A 
glance at them showed their walk in life. On 
the table were bottles and glasses containing 
some weird illicit sort of red liquor, undoubted- 
ly alcoholic, and as such, prohibited by law. It 
is seldom indeed that the law against the sale 
of liquor is evaded in most restaurants and eat- 
ing places in Siberia. 

We were duly presented, and sat down for 
coffee. Shortly afterwards we left the Gen- 
eral with his disreputable associates, and 



130 Japan or Germany 

strolled ofP to our sleeping places. Mine was 
on the billiard room sofa of a hospitable friend. 
Beds were scarce in the town. 

As we walked arm in arm through the rich 
moonlight, the clear, pure air striking us like 
a shower bath after the heated, polluted atmos- 
phere of the close room, my young Russian 
friend took a long breath and said, **We were 
talking about Russian officers during dinner, 
were we not! That is the man we might be 
obeying to-day. We have put in his place a 
very young man who has had little military 
experience. It is not an enormously important 
position which he fills, and he is not a won- 
derfully capable fellow. He is a clean young 
man. He has some sense of responsibility as to 
his job. He has done nothing to disgrace his 
newly found rank. Of the two — the young sol- 
dier who has been placed, in spite of his lack 
of training, in command of his fellows, or the 
old soldier whom you saw to-night — which do 
you think the more likely to merit and receive 
respect at the hands of the men? If we have 
to salute an officer it had much better be a 
decent officer who has some self-respect. "We 
have had too much of the other kind in the 
Russian army.'' 

Something in that. 



On Discipline 131 

In 1912 I accompanied 126 officers — most of 
them picked staff officers — at their head the Gen- 
eral in supreme command of all railway and 
other transportation for the Eussian army — 
throughout the Russian Empire on a two-thou- 
sand-mile tour. We went into parts of Rus- 
sia which were indeed the heart of it. More 
than one town we visited was primitive to a 
degree. In many places I was the first Amer- 
ican the people had ever seen. The village and 
townsfolk, and the peasant people along the w^ay 
were kind and hospitable. The country through 
which we passed was frequently interesting. 
Civic bodies in the larger places gave us lavish 
entertainment. Yet there was a sufficiency of 
drunkenness and debauchery among the Rus- 
sian officers on that staff ride to make the ob- 
server wonder w^hether those who revelled in it 
were capable of serious effort. A capacity for 
drink and a freedom from all restraint were 
the chief characteristics of much too great a 
number of the officers of the Russian army of 
the old pre-war days. 

When one thinks what the Russian soldier 
has undergone, when one realises the brutality 
from which he has suffered for decades, when 
it is taken into consideration that no Russian 
officer has been trained to take the slightest care 



132 Japan or Germany 

for the welfare or comfort of bis men, it is a 
surprise, that the Eussian officers as a class 
have been molested so little by their men since 
the outbreak of the Eussian revolution. The 
Eussian officer has fought well in many in- 
stances. As a class, however, it can hardly be 
said that he merited much respect from his sol- 
diers. After such a revulsion as the Eussian 
revolution it was inevitable that he should be 
relegated in the minds of his soldiers to an en- 
tirely different position than that which he oc- 
cupied under the old regime. 



AGAREV— MAYOR OF 
VLADIVOSTOK 



CHAPTER Vni 

Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 

The Committee of Public Safety in Vladi- 
vostok commenced to encounter, before the 
revolution was many months old, a new element 
of disturbance in the community. This was sup- 
plied by the fact that Vladivostok was the port 
at which the returning Eussian political and 
criminal element flowed freely homeward from 
the United States, Canada and Australasia. 
Many men who came in with this immigration 
were good men. There was also a liberal scat- 
tering of some of the most thorough scoundrels 
that could be found. When the first contingents 
began to arrive, their coming was a unique event 
and one for which the townsfolk readily turned 
out. Every steamer from Japan brought a com- 
plement which, on landing, marched through 
the town with black flags bearing various in- 
scriptions, headed by a band, singing on its way 
and halting at intervals for speeches. 

An acquaintance of mine, who took particular 

135 



136 Japan or Germany 

interest in these returning delegations, told me 
that there seemed to be a preponderance of 
Jews among these immigrants, but that they in- 
cluded exponents of every conceivable theory 
of government, misgovernment and anarchy. 
The early arrivals were greeted with enthusi- 
asm, he said. Their speeches were listened to 
with attention and were doubtless productive 
of harm. But this sort of thing wears itself 
out in time. Wild-eyed enthusiasts spouting 
hare-brained propaganda can tire even Eussian 
audiences. The day came when a less and less 
number of the townsfolk would turn out when 
the black flag processions came by. Women out 
shopping turned back to the bargain counter 
after a glance which was sufficient to show that 
it was the same old game over again. Workmen 
who had paused to watch and sometimes had 
followed some large contingent, shrugged their 
shoulders as the latest arrivals passed. Sol- 
diers who had nothing else to do except listen 
to speeches became so accustomed to the reiter- 
ation of weird doctrines that they would not 
go across the street to hear new orators. First 
apathetic, the Vladivostok audiences became 
critical. Next they saw the humour of some 
of the speeches and would gather to be amused. 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 137 

This feeling eventually changed, first to ridicule, 
and finally to open hostility. 

The sailors in Vladivostok apparently de- 
cided that they could obtain considerable enter- 
tainment by interrupting some of the meetings. 
Soon the sailor element was recognised as be- 
ing definitely in ojjposition to the returning 
prophets. Rough treatment began to be meted 
out to those whose speeches did not suit the 
sailors. A member of one group was so badly 
handled that he died of his injuries. News of 
this and similar occurrences somewhat abated 
the desire on the part of the returning orators 
to indulge in stump speaking in the streets of 
^^adivostok. The Soldiers' and Workmen's 
Deputies took the view that forcible measures 
were quite excusable if they were used to com- 
bat theories subversive of public order. 

The general view was held, too, that among 
the returning immigrants was many a man in 
German pay. Certain it was that no one could 
have served Germany's cause any better wheth- 
er or not they were on the payroll of the Ger- 
man secret service. 

Invariable animosity was displayed against 
America by the agitators and political speakers 
who passed through Vladivostok on their way 
to Russia. That America was the home of plu- 



138 Japan or Germany 

tocracy and despotism of wealth and that the 
American workingman was in worse case than 
any other workingman in the world was the bur- 
den of the song on the lips of most of the re- 
turning Kussians who came from the United 
States. America's entrance into the war was 
declared by almost all of them to be purely in 
the interest of the plutocrats and the employers 
of labour and definitely against the interest of 
the American labouring classes. 

Some mass meetings were ordered by the 
anarchists to take place in front of the Amer- 
ican Consulate in Vladivostok. One in par- 
ticular had as its chief motive the registering 
of a protest against the death sentence passed 
on Mooney in San Francisco. That Mooney and 
his accomplices should pay the extreme pen- 
alty of the law for the part he played in the 
dynamite outrage was to the extreme anarchist 
element a monstrous injustice. They intended 
to make great capital out of it. The speeches 
were planned to be particularly inflammatory 
and high feeling was anticipated. The gather- 
ing took place and without any outside sugges- 
tions w^hatever the whole matter was handled 
skilfully and beautifully by the Committee of 
Public Safety, assisted by the Council of Sol- 
diers' and Workmen's Deputies. Cleverly, and 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 139 

without the slightest show of force, the meeting 
was shifted to an open spot at some distance 
from the American Consulate. When the 
speeches became too vividly anti-American, 
some mysterious soft pedal was applied and 
the phraseology of the speaker kept mysterious- 
ly within reasonable limits. Perfect order was 
maintained throughout. The American Consul 
was invited to attend and a copy of the resolu- 
tion of the meeting, condemning the judicial 
proceedings in the Mooney case and demanding 
the release of the criminal, was handed to him. 
There the matter ended. 

One of the reasons for the maintenance of a 
comparatively satisfactory state of affairs for 
so many months in Vladivostok was that there 
was little actual hardship in the community. 
Only people who have come into touch with 
hunger to the verge of starvation, or with ex- 
posure and cold to the danger of life, can real- 
ise what fertile ground is supplied for anar- 
chistic doctrines and extremist propaganda by 
deprivation and suffering. Extreme conditions 
produce extremists. Food in Siberia has not 
been plentiful and the provisional government 
in Petrograd has interfered with the economic 
situation once or twice in a way that might have 
created some food shortage in Siberia; but no 



140 Japan or Germany 

sufficient shortage occurred to cause real suf- 
fering. Laws which tamper with the monetary 
situation to a point which prevents Korean 
farmers from shipping live stock into Siberia 
means that the Vladivostok family must go 
without meat. Eules of railway commissions as 
regards the distribution of empty cars and 
short-sightedness as to coal shipments may re- 
sult in a fuel shortage in Vladivostok, in spite 
of the fact that great coal deposits exist within 
easy reach under normal circumstances. 

Further, the average man in Far Eastern 
Russia has reached a higher stage of individual 
development than his brother of Western Rus- 
sia. Politically the people of Siberia and par- 
ticularly the people of Vladivostok are far more 
independent, broad-minded and reasonable than 
in most parts of Russia. Anarchistic and other 
pernicious doctrines are considered visionary 
by a much larger proportion of the population 
in the east than in the west. Japan, too, is 
much closer to Vladivostok than Petrograd. 
The lessons of the Russo-Japanese war are much 
more vivid in the minds of the Russians of 
the Far East. 

The first election for mayor that took place 
in Vladivostok in 1917 resulted in the selection 
of a man by the name of Agarev. 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 141 

Some time afterwards I set out one morning 
in Vladivostok with the determination to pay 
a call on Agarev, the mayor. I had been told 
that Agarev had been in the United States, was 
a workman, and had wild ideas on the subject 
of Socialism. 

Most of the people of the better classes in 
Vladivostok seemed to think that Agarev was 
just about as bad a man to have in the seat of 
authority as could be found. 

I heard no good word for him on any side. 
One intelligent Eussian told me that Agarev 
was a Leninist. Another told me that Agarev, 
if he could have his way, would divide up the 
property in Vladivostok at once. Still another 
told me that Agarev was crooked, that he would 
shortly find some way to line his own pockets, 
and that he was the sort of a man who was 
generally to be feared for his unscrupulousness. 

Agarev had not been sufficiently long mayor 
of Vladivostok so that the foreign officials in 
the town had seen much of him. They were 
not rabid against him, but I suppose they were 
constantly hearing hard things said about him. 
At all events, it so happened that I had found 
no one who championed him. 

I walked down Vladivostok's hilly main street 
until I came to the building which had been set 



142 Japan or Germany 

aside as the seat of municipal government. Tlie 
doorway was crowded with tovarishchL All 
were comrades, readily enough. Everybody 
thereabouts was a comrade — a tovarishchi. The 
use of the word sometimes almost amounts to 
a passport, if one adopts the right tone and 
manner with it. 

There was considerable bustle in the corri- 
dors. I stood for a moment in the hallway, 
watching the faces of the men who seemed to 
be doing business in that odd City Hall. It 
was a dirty place. The floor had been swept 
that morning, I should judge, but the walls were 
inconceivably grimy, and the windows had not 
had a washing for many a long day. Men in 
various walks of life had evidently been co- 
opted into this new form of revolutionary gov- 
ernment in Siberia. One could see intelligent 
faces pass at frequent intervals, and there was 
many a fine looking Kussian standing in some 
group, for the large hallway was full of groups 
gathered here and there. One or two long haired 
enthusiasts with the stamp of the fanatic all 
over them rushed past, a bundle of papers in 
each hand. Most of the men who were hatless, 
thus distinguishing them from the casual visitor 
to the building, seemed sober and earnest about 
their work, and very attentive to it. I opened 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 143 

a door leading off the main corridor and stood 
for a moment watching a dozen clerks and as- 
sistants of some sort, each at his desk. They 
were working and working hard. Turning again 
into the corridor, I stepped to a soldier who 
stood hy the foot of the stairs and asked him 
where I would find the mayor, Agarev. 

While not actually impolite, the soldier made 
an apparently studied effort to assume a very 
careless independence, and implied by a jerk 
of the thumb over one shoulder that I would 
find the Worshipful Mayor somewhere up the 
stairway. 

On the next landing there was more sem- 
blance of official order. Quite a crowd was 
waiting to see some one. Both men and women 
were gathered in little groups. One noticed the 
patience and quiet with which the Russian folk 
waited. There was conversation in plenty, but 
it was held in low tones, which sank still lower 
when some one approached or passed. Consid- 
ering that these people were part and parcel 
of the proletariat, that the proletariat ruled 
thereabouts unquestionably, and that it was 
new to its feeling of powe]^ they seemed to me 
to be unusually humble. 

I walked to a desk at which a soldier sat and 
tossed down my card, merely announcing that 



144 Japan or Germany 

it was for Mr. Agarev. He picked it up, glanced 
at it quite stupidly, shook his head disparaging- 
ly, but lost no time in conveying it through the 
large door that opened to permit the entrance 
of only those who had permission to pass. 

In a moment he had returned, and with a ges- 
ture motioned me to follow him. Arriving at 
another door he indicated it as the one of which 
I was in search, and left me standing outside, 
wondering whether to brazenly enter or an- 
nounce my arrival with a modest knock. 

Modesty not seeming a very necessary com- 
modity at that juncture, I tried to assume the 
air of a tovarishchi and boldly entered. I found 
myself in a large waiting-room, a huge table 
in the centre, and great paintings about the 
walls, but not a soul in sight. Four doors led 
out of this large compartment, and I was ap- 
parently to be allowed to pursue my own inves- 
tigations in my own way. Beginning with the 
right hand door, I opened it unceremoniously 
and there found, seated at a desk, and engaged 
in conversation with a man standing by him, a 
thoughtful, earnest-looking man of middle age. 
He rose and when I asked if he was the mayor, 
answered in broken English in the affirmative, 
and asked me to have a chair. 

I spent an hour and a half in that office, and 



Agarev— Mayor of Vladivostok 145 

I have seldom talked to a man who was more 
earnest and honest in voicing the opinions which 
he held than was Mayor Agarev of Vladivostok. 

During the first part of our conversation we 
were subjected to constant interruptions. The 
unceremonious form of entrance which I had 
adopted seemed the rule, and not the exception. 
Men bent on serious official matters walked right 
into the room, and sometimes apologising and 
sometimes not, broke in on our conversation 
with a request to the mayor to give them an 
answer to some proposition or to glance over 
some document which they laid before him. 

This annoyed me and Agarev seemed equally 
to dislike it. Smilingly, I suggested barring 
the door. The Mayor said there was no key. 
As the door opened inward, I conceived the idea 
of swinging a heavy oak centre table against 
it for a few moments. That made an effective 
barrier, particularly as I mounted it. 

Sometimes it was hard to get Agarev ^s mean- 
ing, as my knowledge of Russian has ever been 
meagre and was suffering from long disuse. 
Agarev 's English was simple and usually effec- 
tive, but now and then he had to search for a 
word. He was earnest, however, in trying to 
transmit his ideas and was equally earnest in 
endeavouring to catch my meaning. Therefore, 



146 Japan or Germany 

we found no difficulty in gaining a very good 
insight into what each of us thought on the 
subject of democratic government, particularly 
as applied to Siberia. 

Agarev told me that he had been with the 
Russian Purchasing Commission in America 
during the early part of the war. He was a 
mechanic and a clever one, and was used by 
the Russian Commission as an expert in con- 
nection with mechanical matters. He told me 
some interesting facts about the methods of 
that Russian buying commission. Those facts 
are not a part of this narrative, but the knowl- 
edge of them may have contributed to Agarev 's 
feeling that it would indeed be a bad form of 
government which was not an improvement on 
the Imperial Russian regime. 

Agarev was not a well known man in Vladi- 
vostok. He had never seen the place before he 
returned from the United States. He had run 
for mayor on an open ticket and been elected 
by a good majority. He was a Social Democrat 
and an Internationalist. He belonged to the 
left but not to the extreme left. 

To see that man, a workman, an earnest fel- 
low, leaning over his desk and trying to explain 
to me the real meaning of the Russian revolu- 
tion, would have brought conviction into the 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 147 

heart of more than one sceptic as to the hon- 
esty of purpose which some of these Eussian 
revolutionaries have brought to their task. 

Agarev knew Lenin personally and liked him, 
but he told me that he by no means held with 
Lenin ^s views. He thought Lenin a fanatic and 
quite out of focus and perspective on some ques- 
tions. 

The idea that Agarev was anxious that I 
should absorb was that the real power of Eus- 
sia was in the people. More than one hundred 
and twenty millions of Eussians meant the revo- 
lution with their whole hearts and souls. 
- Agarev 's arraignment of the Government of 
the Czar, which, strangling Eussia with its li- 
cense and treachery, sold right and left her in- 
terests and those of her allies, was quite easy 
to understand. Agarev was one of those men 
who saw in that glare of liberty that illuminated 
the political horizon, hope for a more successful 
prosecution of the war, entailing the overthrow 
of German militarism. Agarev believed that 
the German people were strangled by the per- 
secution of the Prussian junkers. Where Ag- 
arev differed from Lenin was in his attitude to- 
ward class war in Eussia. Agarev thought that 
all Eussians should pull together for the formu- 
lation of a new regime. The Maximalist theory 



148 Japan or Germany 

that the co-operation of the middle classes 
should be denied and that the entire authority 
of the country should be delivered into the 
hands of revolutionary democracy was not ac- 
cepted by Agarev in its entirety. 

We discussed the class of people that made 
up Siberia's citizenship. Agarev agreed that 
a very large number of the local population 
who were comparatively prosperous, industri- 
ous and intelligent, must be utilised in the gen- 
eral scheme of government which would have 
to be formed. 

He had already experienced some trouble with 
the Maximalist element in Vladivostok. One or 
two red-hot anarchists were working diligently 
in the community and the mottoes that they ad- 
vertised were very attractive. Their theories 
found fertile soil in the uneducated masses, and 
they were particularly active among the soldiers 
and the workmen. 

On the other hand, Agarev thought, the sober- 
er element in the Russian Far East would prove 
less liable to conversion to some of the more 
wild ideas of the extreme left than might the 
people of European Russia. 

Agarev was against the continuance of the 
war. He thought Russia had but little to gain 
by going through a fourth winter campaign. 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 149 

Still, he was no advocate of a peace which would 
assist Germany. He held the idea in common 
with so many of his compatriots that the Ger- 
man workingman would rise against the Kaiser. 
Agarev was anxious that Americans should 
know that he and his class were conscientiously 
trjdng to evolve a form of government for Eus- 
sia which would be fair and right to everybody. 
The keenness of the man, his simplicity, above 
all his ever-present earnestness, could not but 
strike a spark of sympathy in the heart of any 
man who listened to him. He talked long about 
the plans he had for civic government and im- 
provement, and spoke of the difficulties which 
he found in the way. Unruly elements were al- 
ways with him, around him, behind him. The 
Central Government in Petrograd sent out peo- 
ple at times whose ideas did not always fit in 
with the Agarevs. The labour question was be- 
coming increasingly difficult. Workmen were 
demanding wages in excess of what employers 
thought they could pay. The workmen were 
cutting down the hours of labour to a minimum 
that made the sensible Agarev fearful of trou- 
ble. The more he talked about the labouring 
men the more his brow wrinkled. A look came 
into his eyes that showed that the problem 
loomed large in front of him and worried him. 



15^ Japan or Germany 

We talked about the American railway ma- 
terial, the locomotives, the cars and the coal 
trucks that were to come across the Pacific to 
help solve the big problem of congested trans- 
portation on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I 
spoke of the difficulties with which the railway 
people would be faced when the workers tried to 
take into their own hands the matter of erect- 
ing these engines and cars. I spoke of the rail- 
way constructional work about Vladivostok 
during the previous twelvemonth which had to 
be abandoned, owing to the attitude of the la- 
bouring men. Agarev agreed that matters were 
serious, but he was convinced, and his eyes lit 
with a quiet fire as he said it, that there was 
sufficiency of patriotism and love of their own 
country in some Russian workmen still, to en- 
able him to get together a nucleus around which 
a considerable labour effort could be organised. 

The general tone of Agarev 's conversation 
was that things were by no means hopeless. He 
spoke often of his own incapacity and inexpe- 
rience. He held no hallucinations on that sub- 
ject. He was a workman. His associates were 
for the most part workmen and soldiers. They 
had to creep before they could walk. He knew 
that some of his associates were incompetent, 
but he considered they were all honest. He 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 151 

wished to impress me with the fact that those 
who were trying to run the Government of the 
Pri-Amur District were doing so conscientious- 
ly, and not with any idea of personal gain or 
emolument. 

We probed deeply into the question of what 
Siberia would do if the more sober element con- 
tinued to have a voice in governmental affairs, 
while wilder, more revolutionary councils con- 
tinued to prevail in Petrograd. That part of 
the conversation was mostly *4fs'' and ^^buts.'* 
I gathered from it, nevertheless, that Agarev 
thought the extreme Bolsheviki element would 
find difficulty in carrying Siberia with it if it 
went too far. 

Agarev realised the value of the friendship 
and sympathy of America and deplored the no 
inconsiderable amount of anti- American feeling 
among his associates. He was frank to say 
that he considered that there was much of plu- 
tocracy in America, and that it needed wiping 
out. He thought that the imperialism of Eng- 
land and the capitalistic control in France were 
menaces to sound international fellowship. 
Plainly, Agarev saw things to fight in German}^ 
things to fight in America, things to fight in 
England, and things to fight in France. It was 
hard to make him see that the method of fight- 



152 Japan or Germany 

ing these various conditions with which he and 
his fellows disagreed must be a different meth- 
od for each one. On that subject Agarev was 
consistent — foolishly consistent. When I ar- 
gued to him that the day of extreme plutocracy 
in America was beginning to close ; that the im- 
perialism of England was to-day — so far as he 
understood it to mean a policy of aggrandise- 
ment — a thing of the past, and that he was all 
wrong about France, he listened most atten- 
tively. 

I suggested that a campaign of education was 
what was needed in America and England and 
France, if it was true that the Russian proleta- 
nat was really further advanced than the peo- 
ple of those countries. When I pressed home 
the argument that a campaign of education was 
the only way for the internationalists to gain 
ground, Agarev turned back to his contention 
that what was needed against Germany, more 
than the meagre resistance which might be 
made against the German army by the scat- 
tered and discouraged and disintegrated Rus- 
sian legions, was a campaign of education to 
convert the Teutonic labouring man. 

On most subjects I could talk to my Russian 
friends with the knowledge that they tried to get 
my viewpoint. The one wall which I was always 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 153 

finding across my path was the ingrained 
belief that Germany would some day rise 
against its ruling classes. I told Agarev that 
never until Russia had suffered all sorts of in- 
dignity at the hands of Germany — never until 
a German army had swept over defenceless Rus- 
sia — would he or his fellows get the right per- 
spective as to the mind of the German working- 
man. Educated in state schools, preached at 
in state churches, fed with state pap from in- 
fancy, the German workingman was utterly 
misread and is utterly misread by the Russian 
workingman. Germany has seen to that. 

Agarev 's summary of the situation political- 
ly in Russia was somewhat different than that 
which I encountered elsewhere. He drew up 
a little table for me, beginning with the Tempo- 
rary Government and writing under that the 
Temporary Council of the Republic. Under 
that came the Central Administrative Commit- 
tee, and then drawing a long line, he said, 
*^ These three are but the froth on the real power 
of Russia; the real power lies along this line 
below. ^' He wrote three captions along that 
lower line: one was the Council of Workmen's 
and Soldiers' Deputies; next was the Central 
Committee of the Fleets, and the third was the 
Council of Peasant's Deputies. 



154 Japan or Germany 

^^It has taken the outside world too long to 
realise that the real power in Russia lies in 
the hands of the people's committees, '* said 
Agarev. ^*The temporary government is, in a 
sense, only exploiting the real power of Rus- 
sia. Temporary governments may come and 
go, but so long as there is a Russia, the power 
will be in the people. They may not know how 
to wield it. It may take them years to be able 
to express and organise that power. Dark days 
may be ahead, but the coming of a better day is 
sure." 

Agarev told me that of all the political par- 
ties in Russia there were only half a dozen that 
cut much figure. He would divide all the politi- 
cal elements in Russia into two groups, the In- 
ternationalists and the Protectionists. On a 
writing pad he drew out his groups, placing the 
Internationalists on the left and the Protection- 
ists on the right. The extreme right were the 
Cadets ; next to them came the right section of 
the Socialist Revolutionaries. The third group 
of the Protectionist element was the right wing 
of the Social Democrats. 

The left, the Internationalists, he divided into 
three groups likewise. The extreme left, the 
Bolsheviks, he said, were many of them So- 
cial Democrats, whose views were less extreme 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 155 

than people thought. Next in authority in Pet- 
rograd came the Maximalists, who were, ac- 
cording to Agarev, the left wing of the Socialist 
Revolutionaries. His third section of Interna- 
tionalists w^as the left wing of the Social Demo- 
crats, which he termed Minimalists, and to 
which, I gathered, he belonged. 

Agarev was satisfied that Lenin was not a 
traitor to Russia, nor bought with German gold. 
Agarev w^as against many of Lenin's policies. 

The agitation that the Bolsheviki were carry- 
ing on against the Allies, did not get much sym- 
pathy in Siberia. At least, many Russians in 
Siberia were less rabid against the forms of 
government which the Allies enjoyed than were 
the Bolsheviki of European Russia. Another 
point of divergence between the extreme Bol- 
shevik group and the Social Democrats of Si- 
beria was the question of the complete social- 
isation of industrial concerns and the imme- 
diate confiscation of private property. While 
Agarev 's view^s on these two points would be 
considered extremely radical, they were not an- 
archistic. He wanted to see a certain amount 
of nationalisation of big businesses, and he also 
wanted to see the land taken from the large 
land owners and the peasantry of the country 
given a chance to administer it. He would 



156 Japan or Germany 

reach neither goal, however, by hurried or un- 
fair means. It was just those little differences, 
.between the Bolshevik view in Russia and the 
view of Agarev, those he represented and those 
with whom he was grouped in Siberia, which 
showed the difference between the Russian 
point of view and the Siberian point of view. 
It may have been hard sometimes to see the 
actual difference, but it existed nevertheless and 
was always cropping up. 

I think that Agarev hoped some day to see 
complete socialisation of industrial enterprises 
in Russia. He was certainly very much in fa- 
vour of an immediate peace, if an honourable 
peace could be gained. His views on such topics 
were not in accord with those of most of us 
from the Western World, but his attitude to- 
ward them and toward us was such that friendly 
co-operation and mutual understanding was by 
no means impossible. The very fact that 
Agarev and the best political elements in Si- 
beria were tolerant of the idea that some one 
beside the workingmen themselves might have 
a voice in things to do with government and ad- 
ministration was a much more happy state of 
affairs than one found in Petrograd or Moscow. 

As we concluded our conversation, Agarev 
stood beside me and said, * ^ It is a big problem 



Agarev — Mayor of Vladivostok 157 

for us and we are new to it. We want so much 
to do right. We want so much to avoid making 
mistakes. That we will never be able to do. 
If you great people of America will give us 
sympathy and assistance, if you will be patient 
with us and try to understand us, if you will not 
become angry and disgusted with us because 
we make mistakes in the beginning, it will 
help us wonderfully to pull through. We are 
going to win in the end, in this generation or 
the next, or possibly in some generation unborn. 
There is too much good in Eussia — it will not 
be entirely lost." 

Agarev took my hand in his, and I looked 
straight into his clear, grey eyes, — patient eyes, 
eyes that held in them some unconscious antici- 
pation of trouble ahead. I felt a lump in my 
throat as I tried to tell him that there are many 
of us who sympathised but little with hosts of 
his ideas and methods, but back of it all our 
eyes were on a very similar goal, our hearts 
were in a very similar fight. 

I could not walk down the crowded stairway 
and out into the bright sun and clear crisp air 
of Vladivostok without a vague restless feeling 
that trouble lay ahead for Agarev and his kind. 
The Bolsheviki element with its catch phrases 
was gaining the ear of the people. German 



158 Japan or Germany 

propaganda, hard at work in Siberia, as else- 
where, was assisting the overthrow of the Mini- 
malist group, and the ultimate domination of 
the Maximalists or even of the Bolsheviki. 

But so long as there are men like Agarev, 
who are fighting to save Siberia, no man can 
withhold his sympathy, advice and such assist- 
ance as he may be able to give. 

To what good end? God knows. Without 
sympathy and assistance, without a word of 
guidance here and a word of admonition there, 
what good lies in such men and their work may 
be irretrievably lost. Every atom of that good 
which we can save, Russia needs- — Siberia 
needs. Who would withhold help, if there is 
even a fighting chance that some of the seed 
may take root and one day bear flower? 



THE TRANS-SIBERIAN TRANS- 
PORTATION PROBLEM 



CHAPTER IX 

The Trans-Siberian Transportation Problem 

It is easy to criticise tlie actions of a man or 
a group as regards their handling of the affairs 
of the community. It is much more difficult 
to try to understand and appreciate the real 
fundamental reasons for the action of such 
people. To know just what the Committee of 
Public Safety, the Council of Soldiers' and 
Workmen's Deputies in Vladivostok and Mayor 
Agarev, with his assistants in the municipal 
government, might have been expected to have 
been able to effect in connection with their ef- 
forts toward a government of the people, by 
the people and for the people in the Pri-Amur, 
it is necessary to glance at the picture which 
Vladivostok and Siberia presented when the 
revolution in Petrograd drifted out across the 
Steppes and into the Russian Far East. 

Never in the history of the country had it 
known decent constructive government. Was 
it to have any better form of government under 

161 



i62 Japan or Germany 

the revolutionary regime! If not, if the most 
conscientious efforts on the part of a group of 
really honest citizens could not bring order 
out of chaos, were they more to be deserving 
of condemnation or of sympathy! 

Let us first see the conditions which they had 
to face when they took upon themselves the task 
of untangling the ravelled skein of political af- 
fairs and the absolute chaos of economic condi- 
tions, into which the Far Northeast had been 
plunged. 

Never since the completion of the Trans-Si- 
berian Railway has its administration and 
operation been other than painfully inefficient. 

The old bureaucratic Russia under the Ro- 
manoffs knew this well. Moreover, the bureau- 
crats knew the vital importance of the Trans- 
Siberian Railway to Russia in the great war 
that commenced in 1914, and no steps were 
taken to remedy a situation which must, by 
the very nature of things, have resulted sooner 
or later in an almost complete breakdown of 
the system. 

Not only the general facts, but a great num- 
ber of specific instances, may be cited to show 
that a pro-German element had a finger in the 
Trans-Siberian Railroad pie. All the disor- 
ganisation and all the delay was not to be put 



Trans-Siberian Problem 163 

solely upon incompetency. Sometimes the sin- 
ister hand of some German operator behind 
the scenes might be discovered pulling wires 
that made the transportation of goods from 
Siberia to Eussia more and more impossible as 
the war went on. 

In spite of the fact that the administration of 
the Trans-Siberian road was inherently faulty 
during the first eighteen months of the war, 
the Siberian railway system, as a whole, proved 
more adequate to the demands that had been 
put upon it than one who knew the system might 
have anticipated. 

The Russian railway employe of certain 
grades is by no means a bad railway man. The 
better type of railroad employe was working 
hard to try to achieve the maximum possible, 
and his efforts bore fruit. 

Early in 1915 the immense amount of goods 
that were shipped to Vladivostok resulted in 
some congestion there. Efficient and capable 
local officials grappled with the trouble in a 
bold manner and in spite of Petrograd, rather 
than with its assistance, succeeded in tempo- 
rarily cleaning up the difficulty. 

"When 1916 came, however, a very difficult 
situation had to be faced. In January of that 
year the railway was working at very high 



164 Japan or Germany 

pressure. Its full capacity at that time allowed 
two hundred cars, carrying one thousand 
poods each, of through traffic goods to leave 
Vladivostok each day, in addition to which, in 
some qf the early months of 1916 one hundred 
wagons left Vladivostok daily loaded with rail- 
way material. 

Of the two hundred cars which left for the 
West daily, one hundred and sixty were set 
aside for goods and materials which were the 
property of the government, leaving a remain- 
ing forty for the goods of private firms and 
shippers. 

This distinction between government goods 
and the goods of business houses was not an 
important one, for the reason that the latter 
included metals, machinery, leather, rubber, 
tanning extract,' chemicals and such commodi- 
ties which were, for the most part, consigned 
to factories which were busy with government 
work or to indispensable industries. 

Vladivostok has had dumped upon it, since 
the beginning of the war, an amount of cargo 
far in excess of the capacity of the port, but 
the proportion of the material which could be 
described as useless toward the prosecution of 
tiie war is a negligible quantity. Few luxuries 
or articles that were not necessary to the life 



Trans-Siberian Problem 165 

of the nation or the life of the people have 
passed over the Trans-Siberian Eailway dur- 
ing the World War. 

The end of January, 1916, saw the beginning 
of a congestion in the Port of Vladivostok 
which was to reach proportions beyond the im- 
agination of any one in Siberia. At that time 
exclusive of government materials, some six- 
teen thousand tons of privately owned goods 
had been gathered in the port, mostly consisting 
of tea and cotton. No sooner had the spring of 
1916 opened than the steamers began to crowd 
the quays and anchorages all about. They came 
laden for the most part with cotton, saltpetre, 
powder and barbed wire. The last day of Feb- 
ruary saw the government goods still moving 
out of Vladivostok toward the West, but the pri- 
vately owned goods were piling up fast and 
warehouse accommodation was soon threatened. 

During March the last of the go-down space 
was filled. First cotton, then gunnies, then rub- 
ber in great quantities began to be stored in the 
open. There was no other place to put it. 
Mid-March saw fifty thousand tons of private 
cargo safely landed but with no prospect of 
being shipped over the railway. By the 1st of 
June there were eighty thousand tons of pri- 
vate cargo and much more of government 



i66 Japan or Germany 

goods. The amount grew steadily until the 
early part of 1917, when there was a slight tem- 
porary diminution in the tonnage. 

All this time the government cargo was being 
handled in some sort of way, although the num- 
ber of the freight cars available was steadily 
dropping. In June, metals, lathes and Red 
Cross materials were piled high on the quay- 
side and in the fields adjacent to the ware- 
houses. Then came July with conditions grow- 
ing worse daily. 

The top had to be reached some time. Ship- 
ping was diverted and ordered stopped, but not 
before 674,000 tons of cargo was piled promis- 
cuously here and there in the open spaces, and 
the fields around the Port of Vladivostok. 
Small imports cut this down in the latter part 
of 1917 and the work of the Stevens Railway 
Commission resulted in an increase of efficiency 
on the part of the railway service, which cleared 
up a proportion of the goods but the greater 
part of them still lie in Vladivostok to-day. 

An inspection of the piles of goods and ma- 
terials showed that an inevitable amount of loss 
and damage had resulted from the lack of pro- 
tection which had been accorded the cargoes. 

Railway material, nitrate of soda, barbed 
wire, tea, phosphates and munitions caused the 



Trans-Siberian Problem 167 

greatest congestion. Next came metals, rice, 
cotton, machines and lathes, tanning extract, 
oils, rubber, tallow, gunnies and motor cars. It 
was pitiable to walk through those piles on piles 
of indispensable materials. The rolling stock 
of the railway had been allowed to get into dis- 
repair to an extent which made it certain that 
until the results of the recommendations of the 
Stevens Commission were felt — long months in 
the future — the available freight capacity would 
continue to be miserably inadequate. 

It was inevitable that the state of things 
which existed in Vladivostok should have re- 
sulted in strenuous efforts on the part of in- 
terested parties to obtain preference of the ship- 
ment of the goods in which they were inter- 
ested. Up to the end of 1916 the heads of the 
government departments and the Commandant 
of the Fortress of Vladivostok had control of 
the disposal of the railway wagons. Working 
as a committee they were guided by general 
instructions received from Petrograd, but full 
power as to the allotment of space was left in 
local hands. The forty cars daily which were 
set aside for private cargo were jealously 
watched, the Vladivostok Chamber of Com- 
merce assisting the committee with its allot- 



i68 Japan or Germany 

ments. No favouritism, or at least very little, 
existed. 

The difficulties increased when toward the 
autumn of 1916 the forty cars daily were re- 
duced to twenty-five cars or less. Siberian mer- 
chants found themselves in a critical position. 
Most of them sought to pull wires of every 
sort to obtain car space. The usual method of 
gaining an advantage over a competitor was to 
conspire with minor railway officials. Go-be- 
tweens, rumour said, coined money in connec- 
tion with such transactions. The Russian au- 
thorities made no little effort to catch offend- 
ers, but without any noticeable success. Every 
one knew that crooked work was the rule rather 
than the exception. One of the favourite de- 
vices of the merchants was to arrange with the 
railway employes to load unauthorised cargo 
at wayside stations in the vicinity of Vladivos- 
tok. Another common practice was for the 
merchant to obtain orders for forwarding a cer- 
tain class of goods and despatch others in their 
place. Unutilised space in freight cars which 
contained bulky goods was snapped up with 
avidity. 

This condition of things went on for months 
and was ample evidence of a bad organisation, 
both of the police in Vladivostok and the rail- 



Trans-Siberian Problem 169 

way company itself. The rectification of abuses 
was continually proposed but never carried into 
effect. As regarded the prosecution of the war, 
the question of whether a private cargo or gov- 
ernment cargo was forwarded was not of the 
greatest importance, however. When the total 
tonnage of goods shipped was taken into con- 
sideration, the amount of cargo that found its 
way over the railway was almost without ex- 
ception destined for indispensable industries. 
Russia needed the goods, whether they were 
the property of the government or of outside 
firms. 

At the end of December, 1916, an order came 
from Petrograd to Vladivostok that all wagons 
available should be utilised for the shipment 
of government materials. No other goods were 
to be forwarded unless a ^^naryad'* — a des- 
patch order — from Petrograd had been obtain- 
ed. Two months before orders had come from 
Petrograd closing the Port of Vladivostok to 
private cargo unless it was shipped under spe- 
cial permits. Had this order been religiously 
obeyed — it was dated October 29th, 1916 — a 
good end would have been served. For some 
reason it was not put into execution for months. 
Most of the private cargo that came in, if not all 
of it, subsequent to the issuance of this decree, 



170 Japan or Germany 

came from Japan. Some feeling was caused in 
the Orient by the fact that the business houses 
of most of the Allies recognised that a difficult 
situation had arisen and co-operated to the 
fullest extent to assist. The Japanese were 
more interested in the profits that might be 
obtained than in assisting the Russian situa- 
tion. This applied to the Japanese houses 
rather than to the Japanese government, which 
had always shown an inclination to play the 
game with Russia in the Far East during the 
war. 

The coming of the Stevens Commission from 
America was the only ray of light on a very 
black horizon. The situation which was found 
by the American railway men was not hopeful. 

First, the Siberian Railway was wasteful and 
inefficient in almost every particular. Never 
in peace times was rolling stock on the railway 
handled in the best way, and during the war the 
administration had become increasingly worse. 
While the government at Petrograd was in- 
clined to blame Vladivostok to some extent for 
the congestion of the railway, it was not the 
inadequacy of the Port of Vladivostok itself 
which had been the primary cause of the 
trouble. Only a slight investigation was neces- 
sary to prove that ships that had come to 



Trans-Siberian Problem 171 

Vladivostok had fairly good despatch all 
through, until those days had come when the 
railway had broken down and the ships con- 
tinued to arrive in increasing numbers. 

That no covered accommodation existed for 
the cargoes, that no tarpaulins were to be had, 
that goods had to be piled promiscuously on 
the quays, in the fields by the water's edge and 
all over the hillsides adjacent to the coast, that 
the ground all about the basin of the bay be- 
came strewn with all manner of stuff, that load- 
ed lighters were untouched for weeks and that 
steamers which after a long fight gained a bertli 
alongside the quay could find no open place on 
which to deliver goods from their slings was 
the result of circumstances with which Vladi- 
vostok could not be expected to cope. There 
was little at fault so far as Vladivostok was 
concerned. 

The Stevens Commission probed quickly to 
the heart of the matter and in very short time 
found the sore. It was not at Vladivostok. 

Against the good working of the Siberian 
Eailway stood the fundamental fact that the 
long line from Petrograd to Vladivostok — over 
5,500 miles — was made up of five separate rail- 
ways, each of which had its own independent 
administration and its own headquarters in 



172 Japan or Germany 

Petrograd. This division of control had never 
been properly co-ordinated and overlapping 
was continuous. Each section was interested 
in itself only and had nothing to do with the 
other four sections. 

The Chinese Eastern Railway was not badly 
handled. The part of the line from Vladivostok 
to Tchita, while it might be improved, was capa- 
ble of much better work as it stood than were 
some other parts of the line. The weakest 
point of all was the Tomsk Railway. From the 
very beginning it had been absolutely unable 
to cope with the demand. In the centre of the 
great trans-continental system, its weakness 
was the weakness of the whole line. From the 
commencement of the war every head of the rail- 
way department in Petrograd must have known 
how rotten the Tomsk railway administration 
had become and he must have known too of the 
vital importance of the whole system to the con- 
duct of the war. Yet examination of the orders 
issued by the Minister of Ways and Communi- 
cations shows that they were so hopelessly bu- 
reaucratic that no prospect of reform was evi- 
dent. 

As an example of the manner in which this 
Minister made fatal errors, the coal traffic 
through Siberia into Russia had gone from east 



Trans-Siberian Problem 173 

to west. With coal in plentiful quantities at 
various points along the line there was abso- 
lutely no excuse for this. Coal should have 
come from west to east in the empty wagons 
that were being hurried back to Vladivostok 
to come westward again loaded with war ma- 
terial. 

The apparent keynote of the trouble on the 
Trans-Siberian Railway was shortage of rail- 
way wagons, locomotives and general railway 
rolling stock. Repair had been hampered since 
the beginning of the war and all railway prop- 
erty had gotten into a deplorable state. The 
first cars to come to Siberia from America were 
ordered by the Russian Commission before the 
arrival of the Stevens Commission in Russia. 
The Russian Commission had ordered less than 
two hundred engines and cars, but the demand 
for more was so evident at the outset that be- 
fore the Stevens Commission reached Russia, 
it ordered the construction of three times the 
number of engines and ten times the number 
of cars that had been ordered by the Russian 
Commission. Even this amount of rolling 
stock was only a drop in the bucket. The Rus- 
sian railway people at Vladivostok expected 
that the arrival of this rolling stock from Amer- 
ica under the orders placed in 1915, would be 



174 Japan or Germany 

followed immediately by further consignments 
of wagons and locomotives. Further they 
never dreamed that so few freight cars would 
come back to them from Russia. That men in 
charge in Vladivostok were able to grasp the 
new situation and struggle strenuously with it 
was shown by the fact that when it became 
known in Siberia that the order for cars and 
engines to be built in America had not been 
supplemented by further orders and would not 
be until the Stevens Commission had investi- 
gated the matter at first hand, warehouses were 
at once started. In December, 1916, the Vladi- 
vostok authorities decided to build 82,000 square 
yards of new go-downs. This was too late, of 
course, to save some of the cargo from dam- 
age, but the work was proceeded with boldly 
and with considerable success. The work that 
has actually been performed in Vladivostok, 
considering the situation into which the officials 
there were thrust, reflects credit on those who 
had a hand in the job. 

It was strange, indeed, that no fires of mag- 
nitude took place, when so many combustible 
piles of goods were spread about in the open. 
Four small fires did occur, the largest taking 
place in March, 1917. On that occasion piles 
of anununition were lying in close proximity 



Trans-Siberian Problem 175 

to a wharf where artillery supplies were being 
discharged. At the next berth were piles of 
nitrate. Close by great stacks of crated cotton 
caught fire. It was providential that the wind 
bore the flames and sparks away from the ni- 
trate, the ammunition and the artillery supplies, 
otherwise an immense amount of devastation 
would have taken place. 

The Port Commandant, realising the danger, 
lost no time in procuring three good motor fire 
engines and a number of tugboats equipped 
with powerful pumps. 

The Stevens Commission had to face the fact 
that Vladivostok had seen 1,840,000 tons of 
cargo arrive in 1916. I checked over some of 
the railway figures in Vladivostok and tried to 
get an idea of how many sixteen-ton wagons ac- 
tually left for the west each day. On one day 
in September, 1916, 103 cars left. Three days 
in October showed 166, 96 and 177, respectively. 
In November, one day saw 40 leave and an- 
other 108. Two checkings in December showed 
90 and 71. An average day in January, 1917, 
saw but 31 depart, while three days in Feb- 
ruary gave the following figures, 51, 94, and 
136. So they ran on. Two days in March 
showed 69 and 66. Two days in April, 51 and 
70. Two in May, 81 and 139. Two in June, 118 



176 Japan or Germany 

and 103. Two in July 129 and 102; two in Au- 
gust, 49 and 38 ; two in September, 94 and 96. 
Under the plans made by the Stevens Com- 
mission, three hundred wagons as a minimum 
were to leave Vladivostok daily and it was ex- 
pected that the number would be increased to 
four hundred. The original plan was to supply 
many thousand wagons, thousands of locomo- 
tives and thousands of coal cars. Plans were 
made to erect these at Vladivostok, in numbers 
of hundreds per day. The scheme was an ambi- 
tious one and meant the arrival in Vladivostok 
of a million tons of cargo, including a half mil- 
lion tons of rails. This would necessitate the 
employment of three hundred steamers for six 
months, at the rate of fifty per month, allowing 
16 to 19 days ' time for discharge, and that very 
little else would come into Vladivostok for six 
months except railway material. The labour 
question presented all sorts of difficulties in this 
connection. The Chinese are the best available 
class of labour, and at first the Russians were 
not inclined to let the Chinese labour come in. 
This was gotten over somewhat, however, by 
the proposal of the Chinese to join the Russian 
labour union. I asked one of the American rail- 
way men, who was best qualified to judge, what 



Trans-Siberian Problem 177 

he thought of the average Russian railway en- 
gineer. 

* ' He is a good employe and a good workman 
and knows how to handle his engine, '* was the 
reply. 

The Americans were somewhat amused at 
the system that obtained of one man to one 
engine. When the engineer slept, the engine 
slept. Thus, due to the fact that but one driver 
was allowed to handle one locomotive, the en- 
gine would only cover two thousand miles in 
the space of time in which it might be expected 
to travel three thousand. Examination of re- 
pair books and records showed that the percen- 
tages of *'sick*' engines were not high. This 
was evidence that the Russian railway engi- 
neer took good care of his machine. 

When the American Railway Commission 
reached Petrograd, it sought to ascertain the 
theory upon which empties were sent back from 
Russia to Vladivostok, but no man could make 
much headway with the tangle into which things 
had gotten along this line. All Russian rail- 
ways were short of rolling stock, and the Trans- 
Siberian Railway had to suffer in consequence. 
A committee handled the disposition of the 
empties and gave orders for their despatch to 
various centres and over various roads. A 



178 Japan or Germany 

Russian friend of mine spent all one night prov- 
ing to me that this committee was actuated by 
pro-German sentiment, if in fact it was not paid 
by German gold. He could produce no little 
evidence of actions on the part of the committee 
which looked very much as though they were 
deliberately planned to hamper the efficient 
working of the railway. I could sympathise 
with his point of view, and whether or not the 
committee could be convicted of effort to help 
Germany, the Boche had the assistance, indi- 
rectly. 

Stevens came to the conclusion that young 
American railway men as general superintend- 
ents, heads of the engineering departments and 
general managers, as well as chief despatchers 
and line superintendents would be invaluable to 
the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Russians 
seemed eager and anxious to learn, and were 
only waiting for the coming of some one who 
could teach them. In spite of the shortage of 
railway men which the coming of the war would 
make inevitable in America, some three hundred 
picked men were sent from the United States 
to Vladivostok in 1917. For various reasons 
they were diverted temporarily to Japan in- 
stead of commencing their work of reorganisa- 
tion in Siberia. 



Trans-Siberian Problem 179 

The outbreak of the Revolution in 1917 and 
the formation of the Committee of Public Safety 
in Vladivostok had but little effect at first on 
the railway situation. A new Commissioner 
from Petrograd was started eastward to take 
over the administration of the railway and con- 
trol the despatch of goods from Vladivostok. 
This Commissioner, Petrograd decreed, was to 
be assisted by a committee formed from the 
heads of local departments and such public 
bodies as the Committee of Public Safety and 
the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Depu- 
ties. Pending the arrival of this Commissioner, 
the Commandant of the Fortress was in charge 
of all shipping matters and his chief assistance 
came from the transport section of the Com- 
mittee of Public Safety. This sub-committee 
was formed by the main body solely to prevent 
abuses on the railway. Some of the Soldiers' 
and "Workmen's Deputies who could be found 
advising matters relating to shipping and trans- 
port knew nothing whatever of the work in 
hand, and had no knowledge of either railway 
or steamship lines. Their interference was 
sometimes annoying, but for the most part they 
were content with seeing that matters were 
conducted in accordance with their idea of 
fairness and right. 



THE FANATIC ELEMENT 



CHAPTER X 

The Fanatic Element 

As the months of 1917 rolled by it became evi- 
dent that the more rabid element among the 
Russian politicians was gaining strength rather 
than losing in Vladivostok. 

The average business man in the city would 
tell you, with a shrug of his shoulders or a ges- 
ture of despair, that the worst element among 
the people had gotten hold of the reins of gov- 
ernment. In Vladivostok I came into contact 
with several men, whose judgment should have 
been sound, who had become hopeless regarding 
the situation. The chief difficulty in trying to 
get an accurate line on just how matters stood 
was the unreliability of report. Some Russian 
would tell me that the people in power politi- 
cally were anxious to split up all the property 
in the town, immediately and without compen- 
sation to owners of land or buildings. Others 
denied that this was the case. 

I became somewhat curious to know just what 

183 



184 Japan or Germany 

was being advocated by the Eussians in Vladi- 
vostok who were closest in touch with affairs 
and who were in the seat of government, if not 
the seat of power. 

Great care had to be taken in ascertaining 
whether or not a Russian politician was a rep- 
resentative of the government at Petrograd 
or was one of the Vladivostok crowd. One of 
the first things I learned about the Russian 
element who were closest to the government 
was that they were men from entirely different 
classes. I knew one sober, thoughtful fellow, 
who had never been in the least an agitator, 
who had worked hard in America and come back 
to Russia with an honest desire to serve his fel- 
low-men. Closely associated with him was one 
of the most visionary and erratic anarchists 
with whom I have ever met. These men dis- 
agreed on many points, but hung together on 
some fundamental theories, with which their 
minds were both full. It did not seem to worry 
the quiet, thoughtful chap that his friend was 
utterly mad on several very important subjects. 
He seemed oblivious of that. He would discuss 
with me his friend's ideas and condemn some of 
them frankly, but he seemed to think that on 
the whole they were each working together for 
a common end, though tryin,<2: to achieve it by 



The Fanatic Element 185 

different methods. He was not so mucli inter- 
ested in the manner in which the goal which he 
sought might be reached, as in the fact that he 
and his friend were impelled by desire for the 
establishment of the same ultimate conditions. 

A socialist meeting in the Russian Far East 
has an atmosphere all its own. 

In a big empty factory building in Siberia, 
silent machines grouped round as if in mute 
protest at the interruption of their daily work, 
Russian men and women gathered in the after- 
noon of a pleasant autumn day. 

Admission to the meeting was easily gained. 
Any one could come. Each member of the au- 
dience was supposed to contribute a piece of 
silver at the door, but many drifted in without 
paying any attention to the collection box. 

I was an early arrival. I stood by the bar- 
rier, through a small gate in which the incom- 
ing crowd had to pass, and watched the faces. 

Men were there, and women, w^ho were toil- 
ers in that very factory. Others were work 
people of other factories, not far distant, whose 
machinery was idle, too. It was not a day for 
work. It was a lazy day. The air was soft. 
Even the sun shone lazily. I was lazy, and I 
pride myself I am rarely lazy. Why, then, 
should not the Russians have been lazy — so 



i86 Japan or Germany 

many of whom are born lazy and never get 
over itl 

They came in quietly enough. Some of the 
men were fine looking fellows. Some of the 
women were comely, but none of them hand- 
some. They were a stolid lot. With the work 
people a few sailors drifted by, then a group of 
soldiers, and last a score of students. 

I recognized one or two men who might be 
described as bourgeois. Trimming their sails 
to the wind, they were. But few of the bour- 
geois had either sufficient courage, sufficient 
common sense, or sufficient patriotism to try to 
guide the more socialistic elements in Siberia. 
If any class in Russia has failed utterly to grasp 
the slightest conception of its duty toward it- 
self, its brethren, the State, or humanity, it is 
the bourgeois class in Russia. True, it has had 
a rough passage. But it cringed and ran. It 
did not stay and help — except in rare instances. 
It loved its wealth, such as it had, more than 
it loved Russia. 

The Bolsheviki are bad enough, but I had 
rather be a Bolshevik than a bourgeois in Rus- 
sia, if I was to condemn myself to the line of 
action that either class has taken. 

Piles of metal lay about. Along one wall 
were rods of steel which should have been being 



The Fanatic Element 187 

rapidly turned into bolts on the screw macliines 
not far away. I suppose I was the only person 
present who thought that the socialists might 
be better engaged in working the lathes and 
drills than in listening to flowery orations on 
the subject of the millennium. We seemed a long 
way from the millennium that day in Siberia. 

As I walked in with the crowd, and stood at 
a point where I could be sure to hear the speak- 
ing, I became impatient with that audience, in- 
dividually and collectively. 

My impatience died, and I looked upon them, 
as one should look upon them, as sober, mis- 
guided children. 

They were so docile. They were so quiet and 
orderly. They w^ere in such deadly earnest. 
They could not help being lazy. Most Rus- 
sians are lazy. It is a lazy land. Very few 
Russians have had any incentive in their lives 
to be anything but lazy. It really hasn't mat- 
tered in Russia. The average Russian didn't 
get on very much better, if he wasn't lazy. It's 
all a matter of experience. If you start out 
being lazy in this world, and nobody criticises, 
and the necessaries of life come along natural- 
ly enough and pretty well the same as they come 
to everybody else in the community, you drift. 
A spark may be blown into a small blaze now 



i88 Japan or Germany 

and again by the breeze of a passing inspira- 
tion, but it dies down. Nobody cares. Nobody 
notices. It's a hopeless business, being indus- 
trious all by yourself. All the more so — when it 
isn't fashionable. 

They were orderly, that audience. They were 
patient. Russia stands for patience. It's a 
monument of patience. A people could have a 
worse attribute. 

And so they filed in, there by the still ma- 
chines, that seemed to me to be crying out to 
be worked, and waited — with no disorder, with 
no tumult, with no loud words. They were con- 
siderate enough of one another coming in. 
There Avas no pushing or shoving — ^no rudeness. 
They were a bit bovine, perhaps, but very nice- 
ly, very considerately so. 

The soldiers were quiet. Typically Russian, 
they were as patient as the work-folk. As I 
stood there watching them my mind went back, 
years into the past, to other days in Siberia, 
I remembered the smooth-faced boy, the order- 
ly of a drunken Russian colonel who had been 
beaten to death by his master with a scabbard- 
ed sabre, because he had failed to procure some- 
thing for which he had been sent. That boy 
died a violent death. He had lived a violent 
life. Violence was an every-day experience to 



The Fanatic Element 189 

liim. The colonel, who was unpunished for his 
crime, and was soon beating another orderly 
at regular intervals, saw to it that any Russian 
soldier with whom he came in constant contact, 
had his share of violence. 

But these Russian soldiers were not violent. 
They were a bit restless, as if having no very 
clearly defined plan, but they were not the sort 
of men who would be violent, unless drunk. 
There is no drink to be had in Siberia. 

The big shop filled at length. Then there 
was a connnotion near the door and a lane open- 
ed. Down the lane came a trio, who were to 
be the speakers of the afternoon. 

Samelyoff, Parenogo and Commandantoff 
were what their names sounded like to me. 
Those were not the names, exactly, but as the 
three speakers were none of them international 
celebrities, it does not matter much what I call 
them. 

I instinctively liked Samelyoff. He was a big 
chap, tall and strong. He had a fine chest and 
well-set shoulders. His hair, brown, with red 
lights, waved back picturesquely from his high 
forehead. He was cleanshaven. His eyes were 
brown, and large. His mouth was too small, 
and weak, if one wished to be critical, but he 
was a fine-looking young chap, for all that. He 



190 Japan or Germany 

was about thirty. From his dress I judged 
him a workman, but an acquaintance said no, 
he was a stranger who had drifted into Siberia 
since the revolution, and did no work. 

Samelyoff was the first speaker. He talked 
fluently enough, but the combined efforts of 
two quite good interpreters could not discover 
much sense in what he said. He was clearly a 
disciple of Karl Marx. To him there was only 
one class against whom to rail — the bourgeois. 
It mattered not what country was that of their 
origin. If they were what he called bourgeois, 
that was sufficient. He was against them and 
theirs. Peace without annexations and with- 
out indemnities came in for much of his time. 
He was so thoroughly convinced that the Ger- 
man workingman was about to rise and shake 
off the yoke of the Kaiser and his class, that 
it almost seemed a shame to disabuse his mind. 
The German working man was given more con- 
fidence by that odd, likable young Russian, than 
any one could appreciate, at first. The Ger- 
man workers were not only to overthrow Junk- 
erism in Germany, but were to place back in 
Russia's hands all which she had lost during 
the war, as well as to restore complete liberty 
to Poland. The German working man was the 



The Fanatic Element 191 

friend, apparently, to whom the Russian brother 
must look for succour. 

No man who saw and heard Samelyoff and 
had met with no others of his type could have 
imagined him anything but a German agent. 
I had seen too many like him, however, to think 
that was necessarily true. Many a young Rus- 
sian enthusiast w^ho would not take a penny of 
German money, or willingly aid the Prussian 
regime in any way, has spread broadcast 
through Russia doctrines that might well have 
had their inception in the very headquarters of 
German propaganda. They served the Boche 
as well, did these misguided folk, as if they had 
been in German pay. 

Parenogo was a little man. He had a head 
like a spaniel, with a mane of wavy black hair. 
Most of the harangue was taken up with a dis- 
sertation on the character of the Russian revo- 
lution. Parenogo argued that the co-operation 
of the middle classes must be excluded. The 
government must be purely by the people. A 
world social revolution, he was convinced, was 
inevitable, and we were standing on the thresh- 
old of it. Peace, he said, should be made by 
democracy and not by diplomats. Democracy 
must fight for general disarmament. 

The crowd listened attentively, and there 



192 Japan or Germany 

were no dissenting voices raised. One hardly 
needed to understand Parenogo's words to real- 
ise that he considered himself a man with a 
message. He felt what he said and was con- 
vinced that no argument would hold against 
him. 

Commandantoff, the third speaker, was an- 
other firebrand against the bourgeois. He 
wanted to sweep the bourgeois out of every po- 
sition and declared that the Workmen's and 
Soldiers' Council, a council composed of true 
revolutionaries, must have all the power in their 
hands. He began to speak of dividing up the 
land. Every workman was to have shorter 
hours. Every peasant was to have some ground 
which he could call his own. The State was to 
control all industry, and an equalisation of 
wealth was to be assured. 

Commandant off was a big fellow, with a 
breadth of shoulder and depth of chest, and his 
words rolled forth sonorously, his promises 
falling on eager ears. The audience took in- 
creased interest in what he was saying. There 
was not one voice raised to question him or to 
point out the impossibilities in some of his sug- 
gested schemes. He talked on and on, drawing 
a more and more roseate picture of the Russia 
that was to come. He, too, was convinced that 



The Fanatic Element 193 

the rest of the nations would follow in the foot- 
steps of revolutionary Russia. The workmen 
of the world would wipe out national boundary 
lines and become an internationalist group, 
swaying the world toward social democracy 
until the rich no longer existed as a class, and 
there were no poor in any land. 

When the meeting broke up, people were 
quite enthusiastic. Their simplicity was so 
marked and their gullibility so great that these 
specious phrases of the socialistic orators took 
away their breaths for the moment. 

I tried to find out to what extent these doc- 
trines had really been adopted by the audience, 
and the result was more encouraging than I 
had anticipated. The Siberians seemed inclined 
to question some of the axioms which had been 
laid down so dogmatically by the speakers. I 
was in the home of a Russian acquaintance, 
questioning him as to the extent to which such 
revolutionary doctrines were imbibed on short 
notice when Commandantoff called. I was in- 
troduced to him and listened to him with close 
attention for some time. I told him frankly 
that I was in favour of the prosecution of the 
war against Germany and that I did not sym- 
pathise particularly with the Russion bour- 
geois, for the reason that they had lost heart 



194 Japan or Germany 

to an extent which made one disgusted with 
them. 

**I have come to the conclusion, ' ' I told him, 
*Hhat the better educated classes of the Russian 
people throughout the whole country love their 
own skins and their property as much as they 
love Russia. When the unconscious and ignor- 
ant masses of the people, particularly the men 
without education among the army and the la- 
bouring classes began to answer the Bolshevik 
call and agitate for social revolution, the more 
conscious elements of the Russian people threw 
up the sponge too quickly. Once the agitation 
was started and the call for class war was 
sounded, the Russian intelligent and educated 
classes, entirely unprepared for a struggle and 
seemingly with no capacity or capability of 
putting up a fight, retired and sulked in the 
corner, accepting at once the theory that they 
were powerless to stop the riot. By doing this 
they gave a free hand to the uneducated, loaf- 
ing and totally unconscious bulk of the popu- 
lation, who were guided by extreme anarchists 
and socialists and who were continually misled, 
although sometimes unconsciously, by German 
agents. The fact that the bourgeois element has 
been guilty of less strenuous effort to help than 
might have been expected from it, does not mean 



The Fanatic Element 195 

that there are not good people among that class. 
They are Russians. Why do you not willingly 
accept their co-operation and assistance in mak- 
ing over Eussia into a new Republic? Has not a 
man of the bourgeois as much right to be called 
a Russian as a man of the working classes!'^ 

The argument Commandant off used in reply 
was no answer to my question. Either he was 
utterly shallow and had adopted a number of 
high-sounding phrases and arguments from the 
leaders of the Bolsheviki, or he was incapable 
of argumentative reasoning. He talked bitterly 
against the Allies, but I could not get him into 
a state of mind where cohesive statements on 
one side or the other would lead to a continuity 
of reasoning. He admitted that there was a 
good deal of German propaganda going on in 
Russia, but immediately swung to the argument 
that there was a great deal of Socialist propa- 
ganda going on in Germany. The poor fellow 
was undoubtedly of the opinion that Russian 
propaganda would win against Germany no 
matter how much German propaganda might 
be used in Russia. He asked me if I did not 
think the Allies were at fault for not having 
supported Russia by recognising the Bolshevik 
government. 

**The decomposition of the victualling and 



196 Japan or Germany 

transport organisation in Russia became an ex- 
cellent ally for German agitation,'' I replied, 
* ^ and the fault of the Allies lay in the fact that 
they did not earlier pay sufficient attention to 
these two serious questions. On the other hand, 
every difficulty was put in the way of Allied 
effort to assist. The Allied missions which were 
sent to Russia lacked sympathy with the objects 
of the extremists who were exploiting the real 
power in Russia, and an impasse under such 
circumstances was inevitable. The Allies, how- 
ever, could not make a certain section of the 
Russian army fight longer in this war. Never- 
theless, a section, a considerable section, of the 
Russian army would fight against Prussian 
militarism. It is you and speakers like you who 
argue against the continuation of the war on 
any grounds who are forcing your country un- 
der the feet of Germany, and the first thing 
they will trample out of the prostrate body of 
Russia will be the fruits of the Russian revolu- 
tion.'' 

Some of the statements I made Command- 
antoff inquired into through my friend who 
was doing the interpreting for us. He thought 
a moment, and then said, **What you say seems 
sensible in some ways, but you fail to take into 
consideration the fact that the German work- 



The Fanatic Element 197 

man and the Austrian workman have in their 
hearts the same ideals which we have. Would 
you like to know what I consider our new Rus- 
sia should be? It should be a country where 
there were no men who did not work produc- 
tively for at least five hours every day, if not 
six. The remainder of the day should be at 
the entire disposal of the individual. The State 
should control all industries so that no monopo- 
lies would be possible. Great riches could not 
be amassed and the State should see to it that 
there was work for every one, so that there 
would be no misery and poverty. The Imperial 
Romanoff Government went into this war for 
no such ideals. England and France are not 
fighting for such a result to the war. England 
and France are fighting for industrial and com- 
mercial interests or for a gain of territory." 

I broke in here to try to prove to him that 
England and France were fighting for some- 
thing else, but Commandantoff was not anxious 
to hear new theories on that head. The base on 
which all his arguments were reared took into 
account first the fact that he was the advocate 
of something higher and better for Russia, 
something more ideal and more honestly to be 
sought than any object of any other country in 



198 Japan or Germany 

the war. To argue that the Allied nations were 
in any way right was tearing from under him 
some of the platform on which he stood. He 
conld have no sympathy with that. 

'^If you can show me how continuing to fight 
Germany would change the mind of England 
and France as to the sort of government they 
should have, the way the workmen of their 
country should be treated, and the attitude 
their people should take against the rights of 
property,'' he said, ^*I would be interested to 
hear it." 

His words were utterly untrue. He was not 
in the least interested to hear anything which 
combatted his arguments. There was only one 
view for him, and that was the one that had 
been given him in Petrograd. Curiously enough, 
I think he was conscientiously of the belief that 
he was right. He simply had a total incapacity 
for argument or for reason. 

That is the class of man that in many in- 
stances one finds in Russia and tlie Russian Far 
East, and a little well directed educational work 
to counteract the influence of this type would 
wipe away much of the poison from the minds 
of the people. A campaign of education is a 
positive necessity if the Russians throughout 



The Fanatic Element 199 

their whole empire are to gain any more intelli- 
gent ideas than those which are being fed to 
them by such men as those to whom I listened 
that afternoon in the empty factory building. 



GERMAN PROPAGANDA 



CHAPTER XI 

Geeman Propaganda 

No man who has not come into touch with it 
can appreciate the depth and subtlety of Ger- 
man propaganda. I have seen so much of it in 
different parts of the world since 1914 that I 
am beginning to recognise the earmarks once 
in a while, before I can trace the actual source 
of operation. 

When walking along a street in a town in Si- 
beria, one might come into frequent contact 
with soldiers and sailors and hold short conver- 
sations on different topics. Neither soldiers 
nor sailors had much to do. Strolling along 
one morning in Vladivostok, a British officer 
whom I knew met a fine, clean-looking young 
Russian sailor. As the boy passed the officer, 
he paused a moment and addressed him in Rus- 
sian. Fortunately my friend could speak Rus- 
sian well. He smilingly returned the saluta- 
tion of the young bluejacket. We always smile 
in Russia; it never fails to bring an answering 

203 



204 Japan or Germany 

smile. The Eussian boy was clear-eyed, open- 
faced, and his smile was good to see. 

** Would you mind if I asked you a question f 
he asked my friend the Major. 

** Certainly not,'' was the reply. **You are 
quite at liberty to ask anything that you like.'' 

**"We are much interested in your uniform," 
said the young Eussian. ^'We have seen it sev- 
eral times now, and we have had one or two 
discussions as to just what uniform it is. If 
you do not mind my asking you, I should like 
to know if it is the uniform of a Turkish general 
or of an American lieutenant." 

^*How in the world did you come to the 
conclusion that it might be one or the other 1 ' ' 

*^I did not. One of the boys said he thought 
it looked like the uniform of a Turkish general. 
He has been in Constantinople, and he thought 
he knew. Another of my comrades said he was 
sure it was an American uniform and thought 
it might be that of a lieutenant." 

The Major laughed heartily. ^^My uniform 
is that of a regiment known as the Black 
Watch. It is a British uniform." 

'^Eeally! How interesting. The boys will 
be pleased to know that." 

The sailor was about to pass on down the 
street, when my friend stopped him and asked. 



German Propaganda 205 

* *Ho\v could you think that my uniform was that 
of a Turkish officer when you know that your 
country is at war with Turkey? If I were the 
Turkish general I could not be here in Vladi- 
vostok.'' 

^^Ah/' replied the sailor, ^Hhat would have 
been so a few days ago. But now that the revo- 
lution in Turkey has come and we are no longer 
at war with Turkey, there is no reason that you 
could not be here, even were you a Turkish 
general, is there?'* 

**But no Turkish revolution has taken place, 
my boy," said the Major. 

'^Have you not heard the news?" came from 
the sailor. **Do you not know that the people 
in Turkey have overthrown their rulers as we 
did in Russia? Do you not know that Turkey, 
too, is governed by Committees of Soldiers ' and 
Workmen's Deputies?" 

*^I do not know that," said the Major, with 
a smile. ^'In fact, I know that such is not the 
case, unfortunately. No ; Russia is still at war 
with Turkey. There is no peace for the South 
of Russia yet, and no peace in immediate pros- 
pect, unless it would be one that would be worse 
than war." 

The sailor's eyes brightened and he smiled 
back, delighted to find some one to whom 



2o6 Japan or Germany 

he could impart newly gathered information. 
**Then my news is later than yours,'' he said. 
**Come with me to the barracks and I will show 
you. I have proof that what I say is true." 

The Major walked down with him, and there 
in the barracks the boy produced a printed 
sheet in Russian, giving all the details of the 
Turkish revolution — telling all the story in a 
clever, detailed way, ably compiled to catch the 
mind and the imagination of just such bright 
young Russian boys. No need to ask where that 
sheet originated. No need to ask the source of 
that news. That poison came straight from 
Germany. 

Fortunate it was that the Major had that cas- 
ual conversation on the pavement that morning, 
for he was able to hammer home some plain 
truths, not only about that highly imaginative 
account of the Turkish revolution, but about 
the methods of the men who had manufactured 
the information for Russian consumption. 

The Austrian and German prisoners were 
sometimes visited by neutral officials. Before 
America's entrance into the war a citizen of the 
United States had this duty to perform. When 
I was in Siberia I met a Swedish gentleman of 
rank, whose ostensible labours in the Russian 
Far East were to report, as an unbiassed ob- 



German Propaganda 207 

server, on tlie manner in which the Russians 
were treating the prisoners from the armies of 
the Central Powers. 

On more than one occasion the Swedish gen- 
tleman indulged in close conversation with 
some Russian. Usually it was an employe of the 
government or a soldier in the army, but the 
Swedish gentleman was nothing if not catholic 
in the selection of his acquaintances. 

**You poor fellows," was the gist of one con- 
versation which was overheard. *^ You splendid 
Russians. Is it not a pity that after you have 
fought so hard and so well for such a long time, 
and after you have suffered so terribly and had 
such awful casualties, that you should find your- 
selves where you are now? What a shame 
that after the sacrifices you have made in this 
war for the Allies, that they should have de- 
serted you now, just as you have thrown off 
the yoke of your old government and are try- 
ing so hard and so splendidly to formulate your 
new Republic. My heart goes out to you. I 
feel that it is terribly unjust that the Allies 
should refuse to recognise your new govern- 
ment. How ungrateful of the Allies, after all 
that you have done for them in the way of blood- 
shed and loss, that they should turn from you 
now and fail to give you their sympathy or 



2o8 Japan or Germany 

support. You poor fellows. Apparently the 
only friend you have left is Germany — at least, 
if Germany is not a friend, she seems inclined 
to treat you fairly and to make a peace which 
will prevent your going on with the paying of 
so heavy a price in the interests of those Allies 
of yours. It is they who gain and you who lose. 
You may indeed count yourselves fortunate that 
Germany is not so heartless.'' 

The Swedish gentleman was spreading that 
sort of stuff wherever he went. 

**Made in Germany?" Unquestionably. 

There were people around Siberia who were 
talking against the Allies, who were not paid 
by German gold nor subsidised by German in- 
fluence. I met such a one in a conference I was 
holding with some of the newspaper editors in a 
city in Siberia. One of the most important pub- 
lications in that locality was what attempted to 
be the daily organ of the Soldiers' and Work- 
men 's Deputies. It was intended to be a * * daily ' ' 
right enough, but it was very spasmodic. It 
was run by a committee. The editor was a soft- 
voiced, simple, quiet Russian, who, fortunately 
for me, knew that my views toward labour were 
decidedly liberal. In fact, he introduced me 
to the rest as a socialist, although he explained 
that I was about twenty-five years behind the 



German Propaganda 209 

times. I discovered that he had been a reporter 
on a labour paper in Brisbane, Australia, and 
had there reported an address of mine in which 
I put forward certain views with which the la- 
bourites were at that time in sympathy. That 
effort of mine in Australia aimed to show that 
there were some of us outside the Socialist 
group who held fairly broad-minded ideas about 
the progress of humanity, proved to have been 
bread cast upon the waters. 

I visited the editorial rooms of this Soldiers' 
and Workmen's paper in Siberia with no little 
anticipation. The leading minds that had to 
do with the paper were present, as well as one 
or two other editors of similar papers. One 
of these was the editor of a paper called the 
Red Banner, which promulgated the views 
of the Maximalist extremists. 

My friend from Australia interpreted for me, 
as he did many times afterwards, proving most 
helpful and offering his services cheerfully and 
willingly. He was a nice boy. 

On this particular occasion there were sev- 
eral present who could speak some English. 
After some little time, when I had become fairly 
started on the subject of the war and we were 
getting pretty close together on the question 
of how more and better war news could be 



210 Japan or Germany 

placed before them, a young fellow came in, sat 
down and rather unceremoniously joined the 
conversation. He was a pale, aesthetic looking 
young man, a Jew, with straight black hair and 
very black eyes under heavy eyebrows. I saw 
the stamp of the fanatic on him at once. I was 
really interested in hearing the views of the 
Eussian newspaper men, and they were thor- 
oughly interested in what I was telling them 
in return. For this reason I did not warmly 
welcome the intervention of the black-haired 
one. However, I smiled. Smiles were of no 
use to him. He was not of the smiling kind. 
His heart was bitter. 

**Do you criticise the conditions that you find 
here?" he asked. 

**Yes," I replied, **some of them." 

** Before you do that you had better go home 
to America and look into your own conditions, ^ ' 
he said venomously. 

I smiled. **I have looked into the conditions 
in my own country lots of times," I said. 
* ' Moreover, I have looked into the conditions of 
a good many countries besides my own." 

*^ After what America has done to Eussia you 
should be ashamed to come here," he said, his 
black eyes darting fire as he spoke. 



German Propaganda 21 1 

I smiled again. It was a little forced that 
time. 

** America has certainly done Russia no 
harm/* I replied. 

^ ^ There has been a conspiracy between Amer- 
ica and Japan to put down the price of the 
ruble/' he said, striking his fist on the arm of 
his chair. 

That remark delivered him into my hands for 
the moment. I had no difficulty in winning that 
argument. It required no eloquence or gift of 
debate to prove that America had done more 
than any other nation in the world to raise the 
price of the ruble. 

But this made the black-haired one more bit- 
ter. As I turned to the question which we had 
been discussing before his arrival and spoke of 
the necessity that the Russian labouring man 
should give us of his best in Siberia, the fanatic 
thrust himself forward again. 

**The Russian workingman," he said, *4s 
further advanced than the American working- 
man. He knows what he wants and he is going 
to get it. * ' 

I ventured the suggestion that the American 
workingman was very well off comparatively. 
This caused a storm. For some minutes I had 
to listen to a denunciation of America which 



212 Japan or Germany 

failed to amuse me, — and for once I stopped 
smiling. The fanatic held the floor with a tirade 
against American plutocracy, and what he said 
about the conditions under which American la- 
bour had to work sounded to me most exagger- 
ated. 

**In my youth I worked at manual labour,'* I 
told him. * * Later I have been a director of more 
than one company which employed thousands 
of workers in different parts of the world. You 
are drawing a picture of American labour condi- 
tions which is untrue and unfair. '* 

He declared that he was not. He declared 
that he had worked in America and knew what 
he was talking about. Spurred on by my con- 
tradiction, his abuse of America got beyond all 
bounds. I smelt the air of battle for a minute 
and, waiting until he was out of breath, took the 
opportunity to gain the floor and told him what 
I thought of him and his theories. 

** You are the sort of Russian," I said, *'who 
is working more harm than good in this coun- 
try. You may not intend to do so. You are of 
the type that is always denouncing somebody or 
something. Condemnation is your forte.'' 

I waited until my editor friend had trans- 
lated my few sentences and then continued, 
**Your work in the world will always be de- 



German Propaganda 213 

structive and never constructive. You love 
driving a wedge where you can and ripping 
things asunder. I'll guarantee that when you 
came to Siberia you started at once to try to 
make trouble between whatever factions you 
could find sufficiently patient to listen to you. 
You are an obstructionist and a partitionist. If 
I was a Russian the first thing I would do would 
be to banish some of your kind. This is the day 
for every Russian to join hands.'' 

That started one of the hottest arguments 
which I heard in Russia or Siberia. Several 
people took a hand in it. I learned afterwards 
that the black-haired one was, luckily for my 
analysis of his character, a firebrand of the 
worst type who had caused some trouble in Si- 
beria. He had been sent out by the Provisional 
Government in connection with some official 
work and was truly the sort of man who had a 
good word for no one. He was bitterness per- 
sonified. 

I do not know how far we succeeded, he or I, 
in transmitting our views to those who were 
listening to us. One or two of the journalists 
told me afterward that the fanatic had over- 
reached himself and that my attack on him and 
his class and type had stung all the more, be- 
cause it was true and deserved. I asked one of 



214 Japan or Germany 

the journalists why this representative from 
Petrograd was so bitter against America. 

**What did America ever do to him?" I 
asked. 

**I will tell yon/' was the reply. ^*That boy 
has been a revolutionary from childhood. He 
was bom one. His father used to take him to 
underground meetings when he was a mere 
baby. The father and the child with him were 
under suspicion for some years and finally, 
when evidence against the father was procured 
and he was ordered deported to Siberia, not 
many years passed before the boy was sent to 
the mines as well. His revolutionary tenden- 
cies grew fast under restraint. He was always 
in trouble with the authorities. For six long 
years of his early manhood he wore ball and 
chain on wrist and ankle. Finally he escaped 
and obtained permission to accompany a com- 
patriot who was going to America. He landed 
in the United States almost penniless, found 
his way to the Atlantic seaboard, and obtained 
employment in the Bethlehem mines. 

**From what he has told me of the conditions 
under which he worked, they may be open to 
improvement. He could not stand the strain. 
Obtaining transportation by chance, he left the 
north and next landed in New Orleans.'* 



German Propaganda 215 

^*What a place for a white labouring man, 
who spoke little English, to find a job,'' I com- 
mented. 

**So I should gather from what he has told 
me,'' my friend continued. ^'He did not stay 
in New Orleans long but drifted out to Texas. 
He knew little of how to make a living, and suc- 
ceeded at it but poorly. I suppose he tried to 
disseminate some of his extreme Socialist ideas 
and that they met with an unpleasant reception 
in Texas. He says frankly sometimes that he 
was more than once knocked about. ' ' 

I could see that thin-faced, black-haired young 
Russian, all nerves and fire, being roughly 
handled by some one who had considered physi- 
cal violence the best reply to some of his argu- 
ments. I could see him snarl, too, when he was 
kicked. 

*^He disliked America, and when the Rus- 
sian revolution came and he was given an op- 
portunity to come back to Russia, he was glad 
to shake the dust of America from his feet. He 
has talked to me about your country more than 
once. He would not like to go there again. Is 
it natural that he should dislike America?" 

I suppose so. I suppose he saw no right hand 
of fellowship reached toward him. Perhaps it 
was natural that he should dislike America. 



2i6 Japan or Germany 

There may be things in America that some of 
us would dislike if we would get into touch with 
them. I wonder. 

I met that Russian afterwards, and talked 
further to him. I think he disliked me less on 
the occasion of our second encounter. No words 
of mine, however, could convince him that he 
was wrong about America; or that the condi- 
tions under which the American labouring man 
worked were better than he thought them. 
While I did not sympathise greatly with him 
from some standpoints, I could be sorry for 
him. After all, he was the victim of a system — 
of environments over which he certainly had 
but little control. 



BACK TO JAPAN— AND HOME 
TO THE U. S. A. 



CHAPTER XII 
Back to Japan — and Home to the U. S. A. 

In passing through from Siberia, I found of- 
ficial Japan was ready and willing to send an 
army into the Russian Far East to guard the 
accumulated stores in Vladivostok and to take 
possession of the Trans-Siberian Railway. It 
would be futile for Japan to land troops in 
Vladivostok, without taking over the line as far 
to the eastward as Irkutsk. I heard many and 
varied stories of not unfriendly Russian action 
toward German and Austrian prisoners, but so 
far as Siberia is concerned, enemy prisoners 
had not been released at that time to any ap- 
preciable extent, and there was no menace at 
that moment from this source. 

In Japan, one cannot but come into contact 
with the loud-voiced element which talks wildly 
of the amount of good to the Allied cause which 
Japan's actions thus far have accomplished. 
In newspaper offices, in business houses, in 
Japanese homes, in the universities and schools 

219 



220 Japan or Germany 

and in Governmental Departments, one con- 
tinually finds Japanese who overestimate the 
value of Japan's services to the Allies. The 
taking of Kiao-chow, the convoying of the Aus- 
tralian troops, the occupation of some of Ger- 
many's islands in the Pacific and the work of 
Japan's fleet would be given more prominence 
and praise by the average traveller in Japan if 
the Japanese did not themselves so continually 
lay weight and stress upon these things. 

The man in the street in Japan held such a 
diversity of views on all subjects connected with 
the war, that one had to make a veritable sym- 
posium of expressions of opinion to come to 
any definite conclusion as to the sympathy of 
the public or its lack of sympathy with the pro- 
posal to despatch an armed Japanese expedi- 
tion to Siberia or Eussia in support of the 
Allies. 

Japan must be understood and the Japanese 
form of government must be understood before 
one can grasp the exact values of Japanese pub- 
lic opinion. 

Terauchi and his Cabinet and their expres- 
sions are a much better guide to what may be 
expected of Japan than several dozen conver- 
sations with men who hold no particular place 
in affairs Japanese. 



Back to Japan 221 

Count Terauclii told me plainly how he felt 
on the subject. He pledged Japan, so long as 
he is Premier, to do all in her power to help. 

Count Terauchi told me very plainly that per- 
sonally he had always been sorry that circum- 
stances did not permit of Japan's armies taking 
the field against Germany. Terauchi is a mili- 
tary man and a real soldier. He knows, as 
many leading minds in Japan know, the vast 
difference between building up a military force 
on a militaristic basis in the way Germany did, 
and the maintenance of a strong army with a 
constant eye on adequate military preparation. 
Just as Japan must have the support of some 
allied naval power, so she must have some quid 
pro quo to offer as a basis for such alliance. 
Japan, armed and ready to preserve the peace 
of the Far East, may be just as much an asset 
to such a peace as she might be a menace to it. 
One rarely finds a middle view on this subject 
in the Far East. Japan and the Japanese talk 
so much about preserving the peace of the Far 
East that any one who is anti-Japanese sneers 
at the very expression. Nevertheless, the main- 
tenance of no little military strength on the 
part of Japan might prove a very active factor 
in preventing the breaking out of trouble here 



222 Japan or Germany 

and there, as it certainly has done, to some ex- 
tent, in Siberia. 

Terauchi is the strong man of the Orient. I 
like him and admire him. He is autocratic, 
but a fighter. The Island Empire could have 
no better hand on the reins than his when the 
day comes for her soldiers to move in their tens 
of thousands along the paths that lead to blood 
and fire. Terauchi has kept his troth with the 
Allies, too. I have no authority from him to 
say so, but I am perfectly certain he brought 
Japan as far as he could toward giving the Al- 
lies the shipping assistance they asked. But 
Terauchi cannot do miracles. The big shipping 
concerns are the money power in Japan, and 
Japan is no democracy. The influence and au- 
thority of big business in Japan is great. To 
realise how great try to find out, in big national 
matters in Japan, where the Mitsui Bussan 
Kaisha begins and where the government ends. 
Study the Mitsukoshi Company. Yes, big busi- 
ness is big business, and sometimes bad big 
business, in Japan. That is some of the ma- 
terialism Japan has absorbed from the West. 

Count Terauchi will be Premier of Japan, so 
far as human forecast can be made, until the 
end of the war. If Viscount Kato and the oppo- 
sition of which he is the head v/ere to prove 



Back to Japan 223 

capable of ousting Terauchi from the Premier- 
sMp, they would have done so long before this. 
They were able, owing to the constitution of 
the Diet and the arbitrary nature of Terauchi's 
appointment as Premier, to make him go to the 
country in 1917. When he was returned to 
power in the general election in the spring of 
1917, he could indeed settle himself confidently 
in his seat. The press of Japan has been against 
him with few exceptions since the day he took 
office. He has played the game with the Allies 
and has been genuinely anxious, not only per- 
sonally, but as the head of his government, to 
do what lay in his power to get Japan more 
whole-heartedly into the war. 

I sought in Siberia some evidences, however 
slight, that Japan had been doing otherwise 
than playing the game in the Russian Far East, 
in spite of the existence of conditions that con- 
stituted in themselves some temptation. None 
could I find. 

On my last afternoon in Tokyo I spent two 
very delightful hours with Viscount Motono, 
Japan's able Foreign Minister. Matters had 
not yet come to a head in Russia, but looked 
very bad. Viscount Motono knows Russia well. 
He is profoundly sympathetic with the Rus- 
sians. 



224 Japan or Germany 

He probably realises more fully than most 
of his countrymen would do, the extent to whichi 
sending Japanese troops to Siberia would of-f 
fend Russian susceptibilities. At the same time, 
he knows the disintegration and chaos that ex- 
ist in Russia. 

The policy that Japan must pursue, the policy 
that Count Terauchi and Viscount Motono and 
Japanese statesmen of that class are well aware 
must be Japan's policy if she is to take high 
place among the nations of the world, is ope 
and above-board from beginning to end. 

Nothing would hurt Japan's position amon^ 
the nations of the West more than a move to^' 
ward aggrandisement of territory in the Rus- 
sian Far East. Japan knows that— or at least 
those at the head of her affairs know it. In 
spite of the fact that Japan is not a democracy 
and that none of her statesmen who are in of- 
fice to-day are democratic, in spite of her rec- 
ord in China, Japan will be most punctilious in 
any action she may take in Siberia. Her troops 
there will be very carefully watched from Tokyo 
and no opportunity be given for just criticism 
of their deportment or lack of discipline. Japan 
may be trusted to do what she agrees to do. 

Japan will play the game. Never mind what 
ideas many Japanese have held before. Never 



Back to Japan 225 

mind what ideas some of them hold now. Japan 
will play the game in Siberia beyond question. 
To do so will be the strongest move she can 
make toward the strengthening of her national 
security. The big men in Japan know this, and 
her biggest men control her policies and poli- 
tics to-day. 

Furthermore, it is Japan ^s best opportunity 
for increasing the scope of her industrial de- 
velopment in a way that other nations will find 
difficulty in describing as illegitimate or objec- 
tionable. 

Last, but not least, it will aiford Japan an 
opportunity for allaying some of the suspicions 
in which she is held. It will allow her to pur- 
sue her policy of trying to make Japan and the 
Japanese popular and gain her economic ends 
through peaceful persuasion and penetration, 
rather than the sort of force that is *^made in 
Germany. ' ' 

The need for recognition by the Allied gov- 
ernments, and by America, that no matter what 
happens in Eussia Siberia can be saved, is im- 
perative. Eumours that some organisation was 
to be effected among the German and Austrian 
prisoners in Siberia have taken such form as a 
semi-official statement to the effect that a Prus- 
sian General had been started from Germany 



226 Japan or Germany 

to organise an army in Siberia from the prison 
camps. The number of Russian troops in Si- 
beria must have reached, at the beginning of 
1918, somewhere near 350,000. In spite of the 
dissemination of Bolshevik doctrines among 
them, a campaign of education would bring out 
a great deal of real sound patriotism from the 
soldier element. It would not be difficult to rel 
organise a section of the Eussian army in Si- 
beria. 

One must remember that these men have been 
soaked and steeped in German propaganda. 
Ideas have been promulgated among them which 
would seem absurd to us, but which seem per- 
fectly reasonable to them. The result is thai 
on simple enough questions their perspective is 
all wrong. The Russian soldier in Siberia is 
not a coward, and if you can show him some- , 
thing to fight for there is plenty of fight left 
in him. 

The taking over of Vladivostok and the 
Trans-Siberian Railway, at least so far west 
as Irkutsk, by the Japanese army, would pre- 
serve Siberia from German encroachment. If 
the question is handled rightly, a simultaneous 
reorganisation of the Russian army in Siberia 
might be carried into effect. It would assist 
greatly the effort to get the Russians into a 



Back to Japan 227 

frame of mind where they looked with less hos- 
tility on armed assistance from the Japanese. 
If they saw that the Japanese were not en- 
deavouring to stifle some effort on the part of 
the Russians to assist in the protection of their 
own country, it would create a very different 
atmosphere. 

Too much must not be looked for from the 
Japanese military group, by which I mean the 
army officers who would be in actual occupa- 
tion of such territory as might be occupied by 
soldiers of Japan, for the reason that they are 
not distinguished by their tact. The Japanese 
army officer is not a very polite person when 
he is addressing some one who is to him obvi- 
ously an inferior — this in spite of the fact that 
he is extremely polite to an equal. The cur- 
rent manner of a Japanese officer in carrying 
out instructions must be described as somewhat 
high-handed. 

On the other hand, Count Terauchi knows 
his army and would undoubtedly take ample 
precautions to see that not only officers of high 
rank who might come into touch with the Rus- 
sians in Siberia would handle the situation dip- 
lomatically, but that the rank and file of the 
Japanese army would cause just as little in- 
convenience and friction as possible. Where 



228 Japan or Germany 

there is this determination there is no need to 
anticipate trouble. The effect that the entrance 
of Japan into actual field operations would have 
on the German people would probably be neg- 
ligible. It would seem to the Germans impossi- 
ble that a nation so far from its base as Japan 
would be when operating west of Irkutsk would 
be likely to prove a serious menace to German 
military or political operations in European 
Russia. The material for the entire change of 
the efficiency of the Trans-Siberian Railway is, 
however, available, and the Trans-Siberian line 
under American supervision or under Japa- 
nese, for that matter, would prove a very dif- 
ferent means of communication than formerly. 
Once let the Japanese army take hold in the 
Russian Far East, and it would at least prove 
an effective menace to Germany and a nucleus 
of a sort, if the matter is handled wisely, for 
the reorganisation of some portions of the Rus- 
sian army. After all, the Russians are simple- 
minded folk. They are good natured and kind- 
ly. They have been engineered into a dislike 
and hatred for the Japanese, so far as the Si- 
berians are concerned, which the Russian of 
the West feels in much less degree. 

There is great opportunity for an educational 
campaign which would primarily let Japan save 



Back to Japan 229 

from the Germans that much of Russia which 
she can effectively and practically reach, leav- 
ing the extent of her operations to the future 
and to the development of what part of the 
work she first embarks upon. 

Once given a rallying point and a line of 
secure defence, recruiting for a new Russian 
army', an army with new heart, new life and 
new soul in its individual units, would be a less 
difficult task than might be anticipated. 

I know men who could go to-morrow to regi- 
ments in Siberia, whose record has been one of 
some unrest, and gather around them sixty per 
cent, if not a greater proportion of the soldiers, 
who would follow them gladly to fight against 
Germany and German domination. 

The sort of men who are needed in Russia 
from the English-speaking world are men who 
have sympathy with the Russians and con- 
fidence that in the end Russia will win through 
and escape disintegration as a nation. 

Hope is a big factor toward effort. Imagine 
the position of some young Slav in the Russian 
army, who feels he could gather around him a 
number of his fellows who would continue to 
fight against Germany if they had a chance. 
Think of the amount of heart and hope that is 
taken out of such a man by hearing and reading 



230 Japan or Germany 

repeatedly that the military representatives of 
the Allies have stated that there was no more 
fight left in the Russians. What the Allies say 
does not matter so much if it is said at home, 
for the reason that German propaganda sees 
to it that the spokesmen of the Allies are so ut- 
terly misrepresented in Russia. Wliat the rep- 
resentatives of the Allies who are on the ground 
say is a very different matter. The men that 
could talk to the Russian soldiers and talk ef- 
fectively are men who have been in uniform 
and fought on their own fronts,-— and perhaps 
been wounded there. 

I had good evidence of this in Vladivostok. 
A Y. M. C. A. representative there wore a khaki 
uniform and very unwisely obtained permission 
to wear with it insignia of rank as an officer. He 
came to one of the officers among the Allied rep- 
resentatives in Vladivostok and said, **You 
know the men of a certain artillery regiment 
with whom I would like to get in touch. Would 
you put me in the way of doing so ? ^ ' 

The officer saw the committee of this regiment 
and was surprised to hear them say, **W6 do 
not want that man to come to us and our men 
do not want him. He wears an officer's uniform, 
but he is not in the American army, is he? Why 
should he wear the uniform of an officer when 



Back to Japan 231 

he never has done and never intends to do any- 
fighting ? We do not want that kind of man 
here." 

The officer explained the situation to the Y. 
M. C. A. representative, whose action had been 
born of a mistaken idea as to the importance 
he would assume in the community if he wore 
the insignia of the rank that he had adopted. 
His idea was that it would impress the Russian 
soldier. It did impress him, but it impressed 
him the ",\ rong way. 

Avoidance of such little mistakes as this will 
make all the difference in handling the situa- 
tion in Siberia. There is much good in the 
country and in the people. There is better op- 
portunity, comparatively, to save the situation 
in Siberia than in Russia. America cannot wash 
her hands of her responsibilities toward any 
part of Russia. Help can come more easily 
from us than from any one else, and if the help 
is put forward in the right way, American help 
will be more welcome in the Russian Far East 
than help that can possibly come from any other 
source. 

If Russia cannot save Siberia from the Hun 
and Japan can do so, Japan had best take on 
the job. 

Japan stands to gain much, from the day her 



232 Japan or Germany 

columns inarch forth to war for the Allied 
cause. Much that she will gain may be ma- 
terial. Some of it may be moral and spiritual. 

One thing is sure. Her national security will 
be strengthened in direct ratio to the numbers 
of her brave little men who nay leave their lives 
in the Pri-Amur, should blood be shed there, or 
further off to the westward, where the camps of 
Armageddon may yet, one day, echo to the 
tramp of the legions from the Land of the Ris- 
ing Sun. 

But of greater importance than the national 
security of Japan is the barrier in the path of 
German plans and ambitions that will be thrown 
in her way by the full participation of Japan 
in the war. 

That participation will bring the day of Peace 
nearer — the day of a Peace of the right sort — 
a Peace born of an unequivocal defeat of Ger- 
many on the field of battle. 

No other Peace can be other than a victory 
in disguise for Germany. No other Peace can 
be a Peace for long. 



THE END 



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